The school system offered Kmtyws an invitation into the eureurasiaan universe. So our teachers tried to equip us to discuss snow and eureurasiaan flowers and cities as if we lived among them, while remaining silent about the traditions we had left behind at home. The eureurasiaan invitation was, in essence a welcome into psychic and mental alienation, a deliberate, and often charitable, enticement into an officially supported form of lunacy.
Ayi Kwei Armah
The Eloquence of the Scribes
http://www.armahbooks.com (http://www.armahbooks.com)
"We too have not been immune to calls of the flesh, calls to tired minds to give up thoughts of creation when all around has become a praise song to destruction. Against the testing hardness of life on paths to the way strong and sweet indeed to the blinded mind are the calls of despair, and often has our contemplation of this present world and its arrangements lent heavy weight to such despair. Always, the counter to that despair has been in deeper contemplation of the universe, in contemplation bearing action. Let despair run its course; there is no need to cut it short. The present chances that frigthen, let contemplation of these same chances be definite, clear, sustained and deep. That is what removes the fear. For the knowledge of all the chances piled against us fighting against death is also sure knowledge that if fear turned us from fighting the chances would not decrease just for that. They would increase. That other call, the raw fear of death? That too is strong, overpowering almost, at times. Again the exit from fear is to let the mind enjoy its freedom to thrust deep, contemplating that most frightening eventuality known to the cut-off self: death. For the mind untrammeled reaches this knowledge: that in these surroundings usurped by destruction the distinction is not between those dying and those not dying in our physical selves, but in the quality of the deaths we choose. There are those whose physical death is at the same time the triumph of destruction's road. There are those whose physical death is a necessary preparation for a profounder life, life of our people, life of our way, the way."
Armah
"We do not utter the praise of arms. The praise of arms is the praise of things, and what shall we call the soul crawling so low, soul so hollow it finds fulfilment in the praising of mere things? It is not things we praise in our utterance, not arms we praise but the living relationship itself of those united in the use of all things against the white sway of death, for creation's life. That is the beauty of the seers vision, that alone is music to the hearers ear. That is the sole utterance of utterers conscious of our way, the way. Whatever thing, whatever relationship, whatever consciousness takes us along paths closer to our way, whatever goes against the white destroyers empire, that thing only is beautiful, that relationship only is truthful, that consciousness alone has satisfaction for the still living mind."
Armah
"The white destroyers: what a scene of carnage, what utter desolation they have already left stretching over this land! What a destruction of bodies, what a death of spirit! But the reign of the destroyers cannot reach beyond these two thounited snakesnd seasons. The predators from the desert, they who found so much to do among us turning living bodies to carrion, what are they now? a bizarre sort of egrets feast impudent on their very eyeballs in other deserts they once called their own. Thirty hundred seasons consumed in the lazy oppression of other people have killed their minds. All they can be now is willing instruments of worse predators than themselves, of destroyers even greedier. And the white destroyers from the sea, the worst there are, what of them? Their reign is surely bound within the two thounited snakesnd seasons of our oppression. For their greed is preparing deep graves for them; it will raise against them the torrential wrath of all things in the universe, all bodies, all souls still with the seed of life unkilled in them. Were they not on their way to spread death elsewhere when their gluttony brought them here? Their greed is far flung, far beyond our land. Other lands have burned in their insatiate avarice, other peoples have died in the whiteness of their greed. In those other places surely other survivors have awakened from the whiteness of the trance of death. Others devoted to life will surely find that between the creation of life and the destruction of the destroyers there is no difference but a necessary, indispensable connection; that nothing good can be created that does not of its very nature push forward the destruction of the destroyers. And in that urge to live, in that fight against destruction's ashen blight each people of the way will find every other people of the way.
Dangers there will be in the newness of this discovery, dangers like the headiness of too quick, abundant faith from those too long sold to despair, the pull of old habits from destruction's empire; the sour possibility of people helping each other turning in times of difficulty into people using each other to create a selfish ease. Real dangers, but nothing beside the present danger of despair in the face of the illusion, massive, stone-like, of the permanence of this white destruction."
Armah
"And yet it happens that the beginnings of creation are hard to tell apart from mere destruction. This too should not escape our rememberance: the way is not an old road ready for consumers to travel on; the way is a call to creation. Easy it is to fall into the trap of loneliness if we forget that our people are not just of the present, not just the walking multitudes of murdered souls and zombis around us, but many, many more gone and many many more to come. Because it is useless to locate hope in the already destroyed; it is a method of the lazy hypocritical soul, courting despair so as to spare itself the necessity of action. As reasonable it would be to visit cemeteries, there to wait upon the dead to rise to our conversation. Yes, there are many whose semblance of life is all trapped within the present death. But what are we if their numbers alone, should depress us into immobility? What are we if we see nothing beyond the present, hear nothing from the ages of our flowing, and in all our existence can utter no necessary preparation for the future?
Certain it is decay runs exulting through our people, certain we have fallen into a grotesque dance of death, the dance of whites and kings and princes and other worms and parasites. But shall we call Idawa foolish urging us to remember even mortal bodies can destroy the lice infesting them? That our people will live, and will necessarily destroy the white destroyers infesting us together with their helpers and parasites?"
Armah
Translation of Ayi Kwei Armah's Two Thounited snakesnd Seasons into Akan (Twi)
Translation of Ayi Kwei Armah's Two Thounited snakesnd Seasons into Akan (Twi)
Nnianim (Prologue)
Mmasuo a [ch949]rek[ch596] anweatam h[ch596], koransan a worek[ch596] yi de[ch949] owunyane biara nni h[ch596]. Anweatam no di fadie. Anhweatam nnim adiama. W'ayamyesuo a [ch949]sen h[ch596] de[ch949], [ch949]ny[ch949] anweatam [ch596]brasu mu s[ch949] [ch949]tumi san ma wo biribi gye ad[ch596]kum mu ades[ch949]e. Asuwa mu nsuo a [ch949]resen k[ch596] anweatam h[ch596] no, ogyam', nt[ch596]rease[ch949] da w'anim.
Ao! nnipa a [ch949]rek[ch596] owia at[ch596]e[ch949] h[ch596], saa kwan so na owus[ch596]re ho anidaso[ch596] biara asa na [ch949]ntumi mma da. [ch400]h[ch596] na owusomfo[ch596] hwim nkwa, hwere koraa na yiyi nkwa firi ahihi ne ahaha nyinaa. Afei na s[ch949][ch949]fo[ch596] tu k[ch596] baabi fofor[ch596] hwehw[ch949] ahye[ch949] fofor[ch596] bi da biara daa. Baabiara a nkwa nkae bi da h[ch596] a w[ch596]annya nnw[ch949]re no a, dwuma bi da h[ch596] ma w[ch596]n. Biribiara a anka [ch949]rek[ch596] owia at[ch596]e[ch949] h[ch596] de[ch949], owusini nsonso retw[ch949]n w[ch596]n. Nnipa biara a w[ch596]ma saa at[ch596]e[ch949] h[ch596] ogya y[ch949] w[ch596]n botae[ch949] no, nt[ch596]rease[ch949] retw[ch949]n w[ch596]n w[ch596] as[ch949]efo[ch596] ntamu w[ch596] h[ch596].
Dammirifua! Wo, ansuaniwa a adiama hia wo, wo a wo nsuo yiri k[ch596] anweatam h[ch596]. Due! Ntamu-sen-suo a [ch949]regye nsuaniwa mmasuo de ama asuten a apem k[ch596] [ch596]s[ch949]e[ch949] h[ch596], de[ch949] [ch949]rehwehw[ch949] nt[ch596]rease[ch949].
Mo a mo w[ch949]n mo aso, mo a mohunu ade[ch949], mo a mosusu biribi ho, mo a modwene biribi ho, mo a mokae as[ch949]m, mo a mo hy[ch949] nk[ch596]m a y[ch949]afr[ch949] mo s[ch949] montu[ch949] nnipa a owuo y[ch949] w[ch596]n nwantanwanta aso w[ch596] nkwa-kwan ho nokor[ch949]s[ch949]m, mo a y[ch949]afr[ch949] mo s[ch949] monka nkae ne atiekan bom, s[ch949] momfa mmer[ch949] nkyeky[ch949]mu a [ch949]ny[ch949] ano-bi-ni toatoa [ch596]kyena dodo[ch596] a obi nnim mus[ch949]m no so, adawurub[ch596]fo[ch596] a y[ch949]adome mo s[ch949] monka y[ch949]n fibea[ch949] ho nokor[ch949]s[ch949]m nkyer[ch949] nnipa a [ch949]reb[ch596] kirididi ak[ch596] owuo h[ch596], w[ch596]n a s[ch949]nea w[ch596]ab[ch596]n afa y[ch949]n ab[ch596]se[ch949] ho ama y[ch949]ab[ch596] kweurasiare, ama y[ch949]n akyeade[ch949] ay[ch949] y[ch949]n akyiwade[ch949], na obi b[ch949]tie wo dwuma mu kaase[ch949]b[ch596] no s[ch949]n?
Abrab[ch596] akansie nie, nanso y[ch949]b[ch949]kaekae nnipa a owusunsum asi w[ch596]n so[ch596] s[ch949]n? Y[ch949]ataa at[ch596]e[ch949] h[ch596] owia aky[ch949], a [ch949]resen ak[ch596] anweatam h[ch596], a y[ch949]rekanyane y[ch949]n ho ak[ch596] y[ch949]n sie[ch949] no.
Nkwa mu anadwo a y[ch949]n nne reba afiri y[ch949]n ab[ch596]se[ch949] no mu. Y[ch949]k[ch596]hwehw[ch949] y[ch949]n tiefo[ch596] bue y[ch949]n ano ak[ch596]ka as[ch949]m a y[ch949]ate. Nanso woowoo k[ch949]se[ch949] to y[ch949]n so[ch596]. Dede a w[ch596]n a owusunsum asi w[ch596]n so y[ch949] no na aboro so [ch949]nam abodan biara mu akwakoraa nnyeso[ch596] w[ch596] y[ch949]n afiasep[ch596]n a y[ch949]n w[ch596] mu yi ntira, saa nnyegyee[ch949] ano y[ch949] den mp[ch949]n apem sen nnyegyee[ch949] a y[ch949]de ba.
Y[ch949]n nne afa, y[ch949]tu asu b[ch596] y[ch949]n kaase[ch949] a [ch949]fa [ch596]kwan no ho. atwetwesi mu na kirididib[ch596] d[ch596]m te[ch949]m moma owuo. Wiase anom adutoduru fitaa ama owuo anigyetraso aba mu ber[ch949] a aho[ch596]demfidie y[ch949] dede basabasa kwan so de b[ch596] gyegyeegye fofor[ch596] no ho w[ch596] at[ch596]e[ch949] h[ch596] owia ase[ch949]. Dwabum sakasaka yi akyi, biribiara a y[ch949]de tu asu nsi hwee, y[ch949]ka as[ch949]m a, [ch949]nka. W[ch596] nokor[ch949] mu, w[ch596][ch596]w[ch596][ch596] yi gye oniiko a anka [ch596]b[ch949]b[ch596] mu pae ne k[ch596]n so ntini. Ne nkra at[ch596] ansa na y[ch949]awo no, [ch596]te[ch949]mfo[ch596] boa saa sakasakay[ch949] no.
Amankwa, mmasuo a wo nsuo hwie gu [ch596]s[ch949]e[ch949] kwan so s[ch949] asub[ch596]nten a [ch949]repem k[ch596], wo daakye y[ch949] [ch596]s[ch949]e[ch949], wo mprempren y[ch949] [ch596]ma, [ch596]ma a [ch949]k[ch596] ohunu mu a asangye nni h[ch596] Wo sen nnim awus[ch596]re.
Kaanse [ch949]y[ch949] asuwa suban ne s[ch949] [ch949]ma ade[ch949]; [ch949]y[ch949] anweatam anwea suban s[ch949] [ch949]fa ade[ch949]. Kaanse senee na [ch949]y[ch949] w'ayamyesuo suban no; saa na [ch949]mem y[ch949] anweatam suban.
Mmom, wo ay[ch949]su nso di gye[ch949]. [ch390]ma, ogye[ch949], ogye[ch949], [ch596]ma, atoaso, abrab[ch596]. [ch390]ma mfra nhwea-so [ch596]brasuo no mu bi. [ch390]fa, [ch596]fa, [ch596]fa, [ch596]fa, anweatam de ne s[ch949]e[ch949] s[ch949]es[ch949]es[ch949]es[ch949]e biribiara a [ch949]ka no ho. De[ch949] [ch949]tu ne ho ky[ch949] anweatam biara agyae awunyane.
Asuwa s[ch949] ma. Asuwa s[ch949] sen. Nanso, s[ch949] asuwa toa ne nsuma ne ne nsusen no so a, anka anweatam h[ch596] kwan ny[ch949] [ch596]kwan pa bi.Anweatam h[ch596] kwan so na mmauo mu nsu y[ch949] duamono mu asonsuaa a [ch949]rete abunu hyehye framframfram, a anka akita nkwa dwoodwoo, afiri ntini tiri de rek[ch596] nkor[ch596]batawa tiri w[ch596] esum mu a adafitwa apia ak[ch596] amemeneban hann bi mu ama adane mogya-su-fene hyehyeehye a [ch949]rehinam akyer[ch949] [ch949]no ara ne duabans[ch949]e. Anweatam h[ch596] kwan na mmasuo mu nsuo y[ch949] [ch596]baa kuntunsini ho mogya w[ch596] ber[ch949] bi a [ch596]maanam de ne ho ka ha ama onwunu atom'.
Mmasuo nni h[ch596] a [ch949]tumi dane anweatam ani. Anweatam ka h[ch596] daa; mmasuo na [ch949]b[ch949]wo. [ch400]ny[ch949] asuten baako, [ch949]ny[ch949] aduasa, [ch949]ny[ch949] apem na [ch949]b[ch949]tumi adane anweatam ani. Nsakrae bi b[ch949]ba mu saa a, anka nsuyiri, ab[ch596]de[ch949] mu asu-santen a aka bom' nyinaa a [ch949]rensen nk[ch596]sr[ch949] anweatam, a [ch949]resen s[ch949] [ch949]b[ch949]bunkam koraa. [ch400]no na [ch949]hia mmom, na [ch949]ny[ch949] asuwa-ko a [ch949]tumi dane asuwo(w).
[ch390]ma, ogye[ch949], ogye[ch949], [ch596]ma, biribiara a nkwa w[ch596] mu y[ch949] nta. Hwan na anka [ch596]b[ch949]tumi a yi owu-nkonyaa, ma [ch596]yaako ky[ch949] mu mmienu. Biribiara a [ch949]ntumi mma, biribiara a [ch949]nnim adegye[ch949] mpo, a [ch949]nim [ch7885]fa nko ara, saa ade[ch949] no na apa n'ankasa ne wuo. [ch400]y[ch949] owukurafo[ch596]. Dammirifua due, ademafo[ch596] a [ch949]nam saa [ch596]fafo[ch596] ne kwan so, [ch949]siane s[ch949], afei saa t[ch596]fo[ch596] anya ne nkonim mu t[ch596]fowusin.
Monnue, nnipakuo a [ch949]de ad[ch596]esator[ch596] ma ne ho nno[ch596]ma w[ch596] ayamyetraso mu, a afa [ch596]kwantemp[ch596]n bi so a [ch949]ny[ch949] nsiforo kwan na [ch949]y[ch949] n'ankasa ne nt[ch596]rease[ch949] kwan. Dammirifua due, nnipakuo, dammirifua due asuwa. Due asutiri, due adehufo[ch596], due as[ch949]ntefo[ch596], due as[ch949]nkafo[ch596]. Due mmasuo, nnipa a [ch949]reb[ch596] kirididi ak[ch596] Baamoa Owuo h[ch596].
[ch400]de[ch949]n koraa na [ch949]ka h[ch596]? Ahonu nnwonto[ch596], Nananom Nsamanfo[ch596] ho nnome na w[ch596] saa abrab[ch596]-s[ch949]-at[ch949]ky[ch949] abrab[ch596] mu gya akyirimma a y[ch949]annya nwo w[ch596]n saa atoyer[ch949]nky[ch949]m a y[ch949]reka ho as[ch949]m yi? Saa kwadwofo[ch596] asetena y[ch949] mmer[ch949], asabo(w) asetena a y[ch949]de tw[ch949]n owuo. Nsianee kwank[ch596] y[ch949] mmer[ch949] ma adekaefo[ch596] mpo.
Y[ch949]n a y[ch949]tie saa mma-wo-wer[ch949]-mfiri-wo-ay[ch949]su [ch596]fr[ch949] yi koraa, asa y[ch949]antwa ho adafi w[ch596] awudifo[ch596] owiagyinae hyehyeehye a y[ch949] w[ch596] mu yi? Nno[ch596]ma pepeankoma di y[ch949]n ho barehyia a w[ch596] de totoo h[ch596] a [ch949]di y[ch949]n brasu asi, de[ch949] [ch949]toa nk[ch596]nk[ch596]kyenenne[ch949] ma y[ch949]n wer[ch949] afiri y[ch949]n ho, de[ch949] [ch949]to y[ch949]n brad[ch949] s[ch949] y[ch949]b[ch949]k[ch596] [ch596]s[ch949]e[ch949] fitaa no mu. Y[ch949]n nso na y[ch949]anom awer[ch949]firi mmoroso ama y[ch949]afra ahos[ch949]p[ch949] owuo akyiridie yi.
Y[ch949]ntumi ntoa so saa. [ch400]nam s[ch949] akyipa po, saa nnyae[ch949] a y[ch949]de gya [ch596]kwan no, saa brakyea mu aso[ch596]den de[ch949], ase[ch949] pa nni h[ch596], nkontompohunu a [ch949]nt[ch596] aso mu nko ara.
Na adehufo[ch596], as[ch949]ntefo[ch596] ne as[ch949]nkafo[ch596] [ch949]? S[ch949] y[ch949]b[ch949]tumi ate ber[ch949] nkyeky[ch949]mu kitikiti nko ara de[ch949] a, [ch949]b[ch949]so s[ch949]n? S[ch949] y[ch949]b[ch949]tumi ahunu basabasa a [ch949]twa y[ch949]n ho hyia nko ara a y[ch949]kasa te s[ch949] ahwehw[ch949]-kuntun, akokoraa nnyeso[ch596]...
http://abibitumikasa.com/yabb/YaBB.pl?num=1163729201 (http://abibitumikasa.com/yabb/YaBB.pl?num=1163729201)
"There is no beauty but in relationships. Nothing cut off by itself is beautiful. Never can things in destructive
relationships be beautiful. All beauty is in the creative purpose of our relationships; all ugliness is in the
destructive aims of the destroyers' arrangements. The mind that knows this, the destroyers will set traps for it, but
the destroyers' traps will never hold that mind. The group that knows this and works knowing this, that group itself is a
work of beauty, Creation's work. Against such a group the destroyers will set traps for the body, traps for the heart,
traps to destroy the mind. Such a group none of the destroyers' traps can hold."
Ayi Kwei Armah
"The whole world is covered over with the hell of eureurasia."
Ayi Kwei Armah
Why Are We So Blest?
"The third day early in the morning the great drums were beaten. The people assembled and were a little heartened to see the speaker this time would be Isanusi himself, best spokesman, of whom it was said truth was his food. Isanusi looked tired, like a man who had spent days and nights without sleep with no comfort for a punished body and no rest for a mind wrestling with heavy matters. Isanusi walked to the centre of the public place, greeted the people with respect but as briefly as he could, and began at once:
I have been unwilling to speak at all. The king persuaded me I would be betraying our people if I held back my voice at such a time. I will not betray our people.
'It is about the white men. You have seen them. They have brought to the king and his courtiers greetings and presents. Those also you have seen. And they have brought requests, which the king bids me lay open to you for your thinking on. The king wishes you to know beforehand that as far as he himself is concerned - and that goes for his courtiers too - his heart responds kindly to all the white men's wishes, and he is of a mind to grant them. Of the white men's killing of our people they bade me say nothing. I was bidden to speak to you only of the men's wishes.
The first wish of the white men is this: they have heard of our land, of the beauty of the mountains and the plains' fertility here, and of the metals our earth contains - iron in abundance, gold, silver, and our pure, red copper. These metals it is the white men's wish to take away from us, to take them to their home beyond the sea. In return they promise to give the king and his courtiers shiny things, entertainment for their eyes. They would have us break up the mountains, take out what is good in them to give them, leaving ourselves here the waste sand.
The people assembled murmured their astonishment, but they respected the custom forbidding any interruption at a time like this. As for the king he was still in his palace with his guests the white men.
This is the white men's second wish,' Isanusi continued. They have been told of the forests here and of the grasslands; of the birds and animals we have roaming the land. It is the white men's wish to have us help them kill these birds and these animals. They do not want their flesh for food. The elephants they say they want destroyed, but only for their tusks. There is a hunter among the white men, and a trader. These tow say tusks can be sold for riches. Leopards they want dead for their hides. As for our gazelles, they would kill them to use their heads for decoration.
You have heard me. The white men, guests of the king, would have us destroy our mountains, then our animals, and give them what is of use to themselves, leaving here the offal. In return they would reward the king with gifts, the king together with his courtiers.
There is a third wish the white men have made. Land they want from us, but not the way guests ask the use of land. The white men want land cut off from other land and set apart for them, as if land could ever be a thing belonging to any but the people as a whole. On this their cut-off land they would like to have crops grow. But the white men are not accustomed to doing their own planting and it is not in their minds to get accustomed here. They would have the king give them men to work the land - I use their language, for they think the king owns men he can give away to others - so that to speak truth ours would be the planting and the caring, theirs, the harvest and its profit. In return they would reward the king and his courtiers with more gifts.
Listen to their fourth wish. The white men say they have heard we have many people here - too many, they say - and that our women's fertility is reported a wonder among them. It is their wish to take numbers of our people away from us. They say these numbers would in the new places beyond the sea work on land as ours here...'
Hear now the last wish of the white men. They have a road they follow, and something called a god they worship - not the living spirit there is in everything but a creature separate, raised above all surrounding things, to hear them speak of it rather like a bloated king. It is the white men's wish to take us from our way - ah, we ourselves are so far already from our way - to move us on to their road; to void us of our soul and put their spirit, the worship of their creature god, in us. For this they do not think it will be necessary to reward to the king and his courtiers. They say it will be reward enough when we have lost our way completely, lost even our names; when you will call your brother not Olu but John, not Kofi but Paul; and our sisters will no longer be Ama, Naita, Idawa and Ningome but creatures called Cecilia, Esther, Mary, Elizabeth and Christina.
Hear now the end. The white men wish us to destroy our mountains, leaving ourselves wastes of barren sand. The white men wish us to wipe out our animals, leaving ourselves carcasses rotting into white skeletons. The white men want us to take human beings, our sisters and our sons, and turn them into laboring things. The white men want us to take human beings, our daughter and our brothers, and turn them into slaves. The white men want us to obliterate our remembrances of our way, the way, and in its place to follow their road, road of destruction, road of a stupid, childish god.'
From:
"Two Thounited snakesnd Seasons" by Ayi Kwei Armah pgs. 82, 83, 84
THE RETURN
The pressing needs of the time after our first escape from the destroyers' proffered destiny left little time for rest, little time for conversation. That little time was consumed in the search of kindred spirits reaching for each other.
Of ultimate directions, along which paths we would turn the remainder of our lives, to the realization of what long vision we would bend our energies, of that we had had no time to talk...
It was no hurried passage, this conversation of discovery. It took careful time, and at the end of this sufficient time we heard among us three kinds of voices uttering three separate visions.
First spoke the voices of tired bodies, voices seeing happiness in the present situation [after escaping whitey enslavers], unwilling to risk a return [to the villages that sold them in the first place] to the dangers of known pasts, afraid to follow any future vision. Those whose spirits found their utterance in the message of these voices chose to stay and continue in this new home. They were a third of us.
The second range of voices drew the most spirits, far more than a third of the whole. What dream did these voices utter? Returning was their dream. Strongest for these spirits was the call to return, the unequivocal call simply to go back to the places where mothers had borne them, places where fathers' brothers had dug from these places, from these homes, and it mattered little, the thought that destruction had reached into these very homes to blight them. To the listening ears of these nostalgic souls it did not matter, could not matter that it was at home they had first been betrayed into destruction's whiteness. Perhaps it was also their hope that their specific betrayals, their single sales were mere unhappy accidents, forgettable, easy to forget once the return home had been accomplished, once beloved ones could see again the eyes of loving ones so recently betrayed, now miraculously returning, not wiped out, only grazed by death?
Ah, blind illusion of nostalgic spirits. Ah, self-murdering deafness of ears forever cut off from the quite, reasonable call of our way. Most, far more than a third of the whole, chose to listen to the voices calling betrayed spirits back to betraying homes.
Far less than a third of us were left to drink in the meaning of the third voice. What was the meaning of this voice that called us?
Its farthest meaning, that meaning large enough to hold all other meanings, was the meaning of the way itself: the call to reciprocity in a world wiped clean of destroyers, innocent again of predators. What was the meaning of the call to the way? Its closer meaning was destruction's destuction. Its closest meaning: the search for paths to that necessary beginning...
There was no blind groping backwards along any nostalgic road. This was to be nothing stupid, nothing futile. This was not to be a static holding on to that security - ultimately directionless - we had found in the present. The present station had been kind, more than kind: perfect for ourselves when rest was what we needed, when we were not yet recovered from the sicknesses leading into the whiteness of death. Remaining would be a choice of the permanent life of invalids. Better to leave the nostalgic along their backward road. Better to leave those frightened of vision in the static comfort they had found. Better to work out better directions, to follow better visions in our salvaged lives.
...No, we would not return to homes blasted with triumphant whiteness. We would not remain here in invalid security...We would seek the necessary beginning to destruction's destruction.
...Peering into our people's soul, what was this destiny we saw after so long spurning? This. It is our destiny not to flee before destruction, not to wander impotent, our soul turned coward, our bodies mere vessels for the demonstration of a massive impotence. This is our destiny: however far in our blind anxiety we may think to fly, however distant the places we reach seeking an unconscionable quiet, there the predators, there the harbingers of destruction will find us.
It is our destiny not to flee the predators' thrust, not to seek hiding places from destroyers left triumphant; but to turn against the predators advancing, turn against the destroyers, and begin all our soul against their thrust, turning every stratagem of the destroyers against themselves, destroy them. That is our destiny: to end destruction - utterly; to begin the highest, the profoundest work of creation, the work that is insepaAmwle from our way, insepaAmwle from they way.
This has been no useless explosion of rage animating us, hurling us singly into the brief, senseless acts of momentary, particular revenge. In us has been the need to spend life against the present killing arrangements, destuction's established system; to spend life cutting through deceiving superficies to reach again the essential truths the destroyers must hide from spirits if their white road is to prevail; to spend life acting on the truth against destruction's whiteness; to spend life working with our people, searching for paths to our way.
This should be the lifework of spirits still open to the remembrance of the way, capable already of visions of its rediscovery, willing, determined to make it a living way again.
Vision is the aim of this vocation: the clearing of destruction's pale, thick-lying pus from eyes too long blinded to every possibility of the way. This lifework, its fruit should be the birth of new seers, other hearers, more numerous utterers. And the fruit of all our lifework together: that should be destruction's destruction.
And the passage of seasons? What of that? This is no hurried hustle hot with the sweaty anticipation of impatient profit but a lifetime's vocation. This is work of undying worth, the only work of worth in these surroundings blighted with death's tinsel, in all truth. It is not the passage of seasons that concerns this vocation then. It is the thoroughness of work, the trueness of the search for our way, the way."
Ayi Kwei Armah
Two Thounited snakesnd Seasons
"It is very easy to get used to what is terrible."
- Ayi Kwei Armah
"The events that have shattered our people were not
simply painful events. They were disasters. They
were strange, unnatural catastrophes. Those who
survived them could only survive in part because they
found ways to forget the catastrophes. When you're
still close to past dangers that threatened to wipe
you out, even remembrance pains you. Our people
forgot a lot of things in order to survive. We even
went beyond forgetfulness. To forget thoroughly the
shattering and the dispersal of a people that was once
whole, we have gone so far as to pretend we have
always been these silly little fragments each calling
itself a nation....[Forgetfulness] is natural, but
only for a while, not for all time. Forgetfulness
helps the diseased cross over the time of greatest
pain. It is a sort of sleep, like the sleep brought
on by herbs to help a sick man rest when his disease
has exhausted him. In that case forgetfulness works
towards health. But when the period of forgetfulness
is prolonged unnaturally, then it doesn't work towards
health. It works toward death....Sleep is
natural...even when it comes after unnatural
disasters. But waking is even more natural. Healers
are just awakeners of a people who have slept too
long. The awakening is natural. Healing work is part
of nature. Very much a part....There will always be
work for healers, even when the highest work is done.
That highest work, the bringing together again of the
black people, will take centuries....Often, our
confusion comes merely from impatience. The disease
has run unchecked through centuries. Yet sometimes we
dream of ending it in our little lifetimes, and
despair seizes us if we do not see the end in
sight...A healer needs to see beyond the present and
tomorrow. He needs to see years and decades ahead.
Because healers work for results so firm they may not
be wholly visible till centuries have flowed into
millennia. Those willing to do this necessary work,
they are the healers of our people."
- Ayi Kwei Armah
"Have we not seen the devotees of death? They are beyond the source's beckoning. Purpose has no power to draw them forward from dead todays. Make way for them along the easy road. Those with their guts cracked out of them, those with minds so minced all their remembrance would turn to pain, leave them along the easy road. Do not condemn, do not pity them. Let them go. Or would you try reminding them of their murdered selves? As well graft back blighted leaves. Some restful night after the first thounited snakesnds and the second thounited snakesnd seasons the loss of such, devoted to whiteness (death) in their souls, will appear justly: a gain."
Ayi Kwei Armah
"Chief among the parasites were the ostentatious cripples, [those] who for no other reason than the need to veil their own atrophy of spirit wanted to be raised higher than everybody else even if that raising was merely the pushing down of all of us."
Ayi Kwei Armah
"Their first appearance among us was that of beggars. Haggard they came, betrayed and lonely in their hunger of soul and body. We pitied them, for is it not a part of the way that the stranger shall be given sustenance and helped along his road? But the way is not a partial remembrance only. How was it forgotten then that it is also part of the way, insepaAmwle from every other part, that the guest who turns contemptuous is a guest no longer but a parasite? How was it forgotten that hosts who spread a welcome for parasites prepared their own destruction?"
Ayi Kwei Armah
"But how shall we explain this disease? Let sleep and death again give us an image. The mind is the soul's conciliator with the body, the guide to keep the awakened body and soul together. In sleep, in death, body and soul are apart. The body may fall victim to attack. The body may fall victim to an alien conqueror. The mind can also suffer atttack, the mind can also fall to conquest. A mind attacked and conquered is guided easily away from the paths of its own soul. The body is then cut off from its spirit as in sleep, yet still instinct with the conqueror's imposed commands, a soulless thing, but active. In this state of souldeath the body blindly, sleepily obeys the conqueror. Such a body is set to persist in such obedience even if its conqueror be a distance of days and days away, a time of seasons separate. Such are zombis."
Ayi Kwei Armah
"If a body and soul are working together the mind thinks: I should do this; the will decides: I will do it; the muscle tenses itself to help the will; and the hand does what the mind has thought. Everything works together. But say there is a bone broken in the body. The mind may think something; the will may desire it; but when the muscle tries to move the hand, there are two pieces of the broken bone pushing against each other, fighting each other, instead of working together. This is disease. The cure of that kind of disease is one of the first steps in healing.[...]There is disease which comes from conflict between body and soul in the same individual. That is more serious. It takes much longer to cure. Years, usually."
Ayi Kwei Armah
"Endless our struggle must seem to those whose vision reaches only to the end of today."
Ayi Kwei Armah
"For he is no liberator whose skill lies in calling loudly to the bound, the trapped, the impotent enslaved, to rise upon their destroyers. The liberator is he who from a necessary silence, from a necessary secrecy strikes the destroyer. That, not loudness, is the necessary beginning."
Ayi Kwei Armah
Two Thounited snakesnd Seasons
"Parents willing to be slaves should have children born to be slaves, for they deserved them."
Ayi Kwei Armah
Two Thounited snakesnd Seasons
"If I see things unseen by those who have eyes, why should my wisest speech not be silence?"
Ayi Kwei Armah
Fragments
"How have we come to be mere mirrors to annihilation? For whom do we aspire to reflect our people's death? For whose entertainment shall we sing our agony? In what hopes? That the destroyers, aspiring to extinguish us, will suffer conciliatory remorse at the sight of their own fantastic success? The last imbecile to dream such dreams is dead, killed by the saviours of his dreams. Such idiot hopes come from a territory far beyond rebirth. Those utterly dead, never again to wake, such is their muttering. Leave them in their graves. Whatever waking form they wear, the stench of death pours ceaseless from their mouths. From every opening of their possessed carcasses comes death's excremental pus. Their soul itself is dead and long since putrified. Would you have your intercourse with these creatures from the graveyard?"
Ayi Kwei Armah
Two Thounited snakesnd Seasons
"If we can focus our mindgaze beyond the single self, we free ourselves to see that the pain each isolate mind calls its special fate
is multiplied in thirty million separate cases. Far from each mind being locked by nature into its peculiar spot of pain, all suffering souls inherit a common territory bereft of peace, a field of torment.
From that field of torment a soulpath leads out of the prison of the isolate self, from pain to peace. But the soul on its quest, hoping to find alone an exit from the field of suffering, is doomed to repeat endlessly the hallucinating trip from illusion to mirage to fantasm, as long as it seeks solace for itself alone. From the field of torment, home to isolate awareness, there is a way out.
But that way is not an individual path."
Ayi Kwei Armah
"Everywhere on earth the issue of power is decided with weapons, metal, fire and stone cutting through flesh, smashing bone. Raiders are thieves before the battle. After the victory they are called conquerors. Rulers are gods before the battle. After defeat they are remembered as fools."
Ayi Kwei Armah
"When words are bent to mean the opposite of what they mean, the violation of people is not far."
Ayi Kwei Armah
"Pain too long absorbed dulls intelligence. Pain endured, channeled for energy, used for conscious work aimed at ending the source of pain, sharpens intelligence."
Ayi Kwei Armah
"There was a third white destroyer: a missionary who wanted to replace all knowledge of our way with fables even our children laughed at then. We told the white missionary we had such fables too, but kept them for the entertainment of those yet growing up - fables of gods and devils and a supreme being above everything. We told him we knew soft minds needed such illusions, but that when any mind grew among us to adulthood it grew beyond these fables and came to understand that there is indeed a great force in the world, a force spiritual and able to shape the physical universe, but that that force is not something cut off, not something separate from ourselves. It is an energy in us, strongest in our working, breathing, thinking together as one people; weakest when we are scattered, confused, broken into individual, unconnected fragments."
Ayi Kwei Armah
"...when a people become contemptuous of the repositories of history, they have taken the last step before contempt for their own narrative, that is to say, contempt for themselves as living process. I say a society that holds its own history in contempt is dead in the heart and sick in the brain. That is where we are now."
"...foolishness comes to a people through deliberate training..."
-Ayi Kwei Armah
"What their arms and weapons have shattered with force, their theories have sought through fraud to sanctify as fragments beyond rejoining. What in the course of time they used force to divide, their thinkers have tried to present as divided by the very nature of the universe, eternally sundered."
-Ayi Kwei Armah
"Sometimes work itself gives us energy. If it touches us where it matters."
-Ayi Kwei Armah
"The loss of our names is the death of our soul. Memory is soil, water and light for life."
-Ayi Kwei Armah
"...but what is a gift from the powerful if not a cut from property stolen from the people?"
-Ayi Kwei Armah
"Healers are just awakeners of a people who have slept too long."
-Ayi Kwei Armah
"Terrible is the fragility of good beginnings. Look at the egg; what strength can you see in it with your physical eyes? Yet from that fragility can come great vitality. That is one reason for us not to lose courage simply because our current reality is so fragile in the face of established chaos."
-Ayi Kwei Armah
"The events that have shattered our people were not simply painful events. They were disasters. They were strange, unnatural catastrophes. Those who survived them could only survive in part because they found ways to forget the catastrophes. When you're
still close to past dangers that threatened to wipe you out, even remembrance pains you. Our people forgot a lot of things in order to survive. We even went beyond forgetfulness. To forget thoroughly the shattering and the dispersal of a people that was once
whole, we have gone so far as to pretend we have always been these silly little fragments each calling itself a nation.
Is forgetfulness natural? It is natural, but only for a while, not for all time. Forgetfulness helps the diseased cross over the time
of greatest pain. It is a sort of sleep, like the sleep brought on by herbs to help a sick man rest when his disease has exhausted him. In that case forgetfulness works toward health. But when the period of forgetfulness is prolonged unnaturally, then it doesn't work towards health. It works toward death."
-Ayi Kwei Armah
"Let us work to turn the forgotten paths into the remembered way. Let us mix the long memories of a people destroyed with new narratives of our own making, as we move into space of our own choosing, as we dream in images woven from our people's best
desires, as we plan on designs drawn from our own reflection, then make again the universe that might have been but was not, here in this place, now in this time freed for our new creation.
I will walk with you away from the superhighways of forgetfulness onto the paths of remembrance. Together we shall breathe energy into faded memories of a people once destroyed. Let us walk together, invoking the future into now."
-Ayi Kwei Armah
"It's a disease, a popular one. It comes from spiritual blindness. If I'm not spiritually blind, I see your spirit. I speak to it if I want to invite you to do something with me. If your spirit agrees it moves your body and your body acts. That's inspiration. But if I'm blind to your spirit I see only your body. Then if I want you to do something for me I force or trick your body into doing it even against your spirit's direction. That's manipulation.
Manipulation steals a person's body from his spirit, cuts the body off from its own spirit's direction."
Damfo, The Healer (1978)
Ayi Kwei Armah
"A mind attacked and conquered is guided easily away from the paths of its own soul."
-Ayi Kwei Armah
"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 was not always so. The desert was made the desert,
turned barren by a people whose spirit is itself the seed of death. Each single one of them is a carrier of destruction. The spirit of their coming together, the purpose of their existence, is the spread of death over all the earth. An insatiable urge drives them.
Wherever there is life, even if it be only a possibility, the harbingers of death must go -- to destroy it. See the footsteps they have left over all the world. Wherever they have been they have destroyed along their road, taking, taking, taking.
They have wiped the surface barren with their greed. They have dug deep to take what the earth needed for itself to stay fertile earth. They have taken everything within their reach, things that made the earth good, and they have put nothing back but hard,
dead things in place of life destroyed. Even their putting back was nothing of a sense of reciprocity.
Their semblance of giving is parcel of their greed. It is their habit to put dead, useless things in the hollowed earth to help them take more coveted things....Monstrous the barrenness of people when outside the lonely cut-off self there is no connection with the whole. Blood itself is impotent before the white perdition brought against us by the destroyers from the sea: the severing of each mind, the cutting of each soul off from the whole being of our people, the removal of each single present away from knowledge
of our common past, our common destiny: against all this blood itself is impotent if it flows away from connectedness, away from our single way, the way.
Ludicrous is the freedom of the slave unchained in his single body if his mind remains a cut-off individual mind, not a living piece of our common mind, our common soul...Against the death brought by whiteness only the greatest connecting force will prevail: the
working together of minds connected, souls connected, travelling along that one way, our way, the way.
Connected thought, connected action: that is the beginning of our journey back to our self, to living again the connected life, travelling again along our way, the way....Endless our struggle must seem to those whose vision reaches only to the end of today.
But those with ears connected to our soul will hear a message calling us to a better life, to a life closer to our ancient way, to a preparation for the best, the only living way. It is not vengeance for our own single selves we have been seeking in this work.
Those who can see, those able to hear, let them hear this: we are preparers of paths to the way that was our way; it will be our way again."
-Ayi Kwei Armah
"Wherever there is life, even if it be only a possibility, the
harbingers of death must go to destroy it. See the footsteps they left
over all of the world. Wherever they have been they have destroyed
along their road, taking, taking, taking."
Ayi Kwei Armah
"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
was not always so. The desert was made the desert,
turned barren by a people whose spirit is itself the
seed of death. Each single one of them is a carrier
of destruction. The spirit of their coming together,
the purpose of their existence, is the spread of death
over all the earth. An insatiable urge drives them.
Wherever there is life, even if it be only a
possibility, the harbingers of death must go -- to
destroy it. See the footsteps they have left over all
the world. Wherever they have been they have
destroyed along their road, taking, taking, taking.
They have wiped the surface barren with their greed.
They have dug deep to take what the earth needed for
itself to stay fertile earth. They have taken
everything within their reach, things that made the
earth good, and they have put nothing back but hard,
dead things in place of life destroyed. Even their
putting back was nothing of a sense of reciprocity.
Their semblance of giving is parcel of their greed.
It is their habit to put dead, useless things in the
hollowed earth to help them take more coveted
things....Monstrous the barrenness of people when
outside the lonely cut-off self there is no connection
with the whole. Blood itself is impotent before the
white perdition brought against us by the destroyers
from the sea: the severing of each mind, the cutting
of each soul off from the whole being of our people,
the removal of each single present away from knowledge
of our common past, our common destiny: against all
this blood itself is impotent if it flows away from
connectedness, away from our single way, the way.
Ludicrous is the freedom of the slave unchained in his
single body if his mind remains a cut-off individual
mind, not a living piece of our common mind, our
common soul...Against the death brought by whiteness
only the greatest connecting force will prevail: the
working together of minds connected, souls connected,
travelling along that one way, our way, the way.
Connected thought, connected action: that is the
beginning of our journey back to our self, to living
again the connected life, travelling again along our
way, the way....Endless our struggle must seem to
those whose vision reaches only to the end of today.
But those with ears connected to our soul will hear a
message calling us to a better life, to a life closer
to our ancient way, to a preparation for the best, the
only living way. It is not vengeance for our own
single selves we have been seeking in this work.
Those who can see, those able to hear, let them hear
this: we are preparers of paths to the way that was
our way; it will be our way again."
-Ayi Kwei Armah
"A mind attacked and conquered is guided easily away from the paths of its own soul."
-Ayi Kwei Armah
"It's a disease, a popular one. It comes from
spiritual blindness. If I'm not spiritually blind, I
see your spirit. I speak to it if I want to invite you
to do something with me. If your spirit agrees it
moves your body and your body acts. That's
inspiration. But if I'm blind to your spirit I see
only your body. Then if I want you to do something for
me I force or trick your body into doing it even
against your spirit's direction. That's manipulation.
Manipulation steals a person's body from his spirit,
cuts the body off from its own spirit's direction."
Damfo, The Healer (1978)
Ayi Kwei Armah
"Let us work to turn the forgotten paths into the
remembered way. Let us mix the long memories of a
people destroyed with new narratives of our own
making, as we move into space of our own choosing, as
we dream in images woven from our people's best
desires, as we plan on designs drawn from our own
reflection, then make again the universe that might
have been but was not, here in this place, now in this
time freed for our new creation.
I will walk with you away from the superhighways of
forgetfulness onto the paths of remembrance. Together
we shall breathe energy into faded memories of a
people once destroyed. Let us walk together, invoking
the future into now."
-Ayi Kwei Armah
"The events that have shattered our people were not
simply painful events. They were disasters. They
were strange, unnatural catastrophes. Those who
survived them could only survive in part because they
found ways to forget the catastrophes. When you're
still close to past dangers that threatened to wipe
you out, even remembrance pains you. Our people
forgot a lot of things in order to survive. We even
went beyond forgetfulness. To forget thoroughly the
shattering and the dispersal of a people that was once
whole, we have gone so far as to pretend we have
always been these silly little fragments each calling
itself a nation. Is forgetfulness natural? It is
natural, but only for a while, not for all time.
Forgetfulness helps the diseased cross over the time
of greatest pain. It is a sort of sleep, like the
sleep brought on by herbs to help a sick man rest when
his disease has exhausted him. In that case
forgetfulness works toward health. But when the
period of forgetfulness is prolonged unnaturally, then
it doesn't work towards health. It works toward
death."
-Ayi Kwei Armah
"Terrible is the fragility of good beginnings. Look at the egg; what strength can you see in it with your physical eyes? Yet from that fragility can come great vitality. That is one reason for us not to lose courage simply because our current reality is so fragile in the face of established chaos."
-Ayi Kwei Armah
"Healers are just awakeners of a people who have slept too long."
-Ayi Kwei Armah
"...but what is a gift from the powerful if not a cut from property stolen from the people?"
-Ayi Kwei Armah
"The loss of our names is the death of our soul. Memory is soil, water and light for life."
-Ayi Kwei Armah
"Sometimes work itself gives us energy. If it touches us where it matters."
-Ayi Kwei Armah
"What their arms and weapons have shattered with force, their theories have sought through fraud to sanctify as fragments beyond rejoining. What in the course of time they used force to divide, their thinkers have tried to present as divided by the very nature of the universe, eternally sundered."
-Ayi Kwei Armah
"...when a people become contemptuous of the repositories of history, they have taken the last step before contempt for their own narrative, that is to say, contempt for themselves as living process. I say a society that holds its own history in contempt is dead in the heart and sick in the brain. That is where we are now."
"...foolishness comes to a people through deliberate training..."
-Ayi Kwei Armah
"There was a third white destroyer: a missionary who wanted to replace all knowledge of our way with fables even our children laughed at then. We told the white missionary we had such fables too, but kept them for the entertainment of those yet growing up - fables of gods and devils and a supreme being above everything. We told him we knew soft minds needed such illusions, but that when any mind grew among us to adulthood it grew beyond these fables and came to understand that there is indeed a great force in the world, a force spiritual and able to shape the physical universe, but that that force is not something cut off, not something separate from ourselves. It is an energy in us, strongest in our working, breathing, thinking together as one people; weakest when we are scattered, confused, broken into individual, unconnected fragments."
Ayi Kwei Armah
"Pain too long absorbed dulls intelligence. Pain endured, channeled for energy, used for conscious work aimed at ending the source of pain, sharpens intelligence."
Ayi Kwei Armah
"When words are bent to mean the opposite of what they mean, the violation of people is not far."
Ayi Kwei Armah
"Everywhere on earth the issue of power is decided with weapons, metal, fire and stone cutting through flesh, smashing bone. Raiders are thieves before the battle. After the victory they are called conquerors. Rulers are gods before the battle. After defeat they are remembered as fools."
Ayi Kwei Armah
"If we can focus our mindgaze beyond the single self, we free ourselves
to see that the pain each isolate mind calls its special fate
is multiplied in thirty million separate cases.
Far from each mind being locked by nature into its peculiar spot of pain,
all suffering souls inherit a common territory bereft of peace,
a field of torment.
From that field of torment a soulpath leads out of the prison of the isolate self,
from pain to peace. But the soul on its quest, hoping to find alone an exit from the field of suffering,
is doomed to repeat endlessly the hallucinating trip from illusion to mirage to fantasm,
as long as it seeks solace for itself alone. From the field of torment, home to isolate awareness, there is a way out.
But that way is not an individual path."
Ayi Kwei Armah
"How have we come to be mere mirrors to annihilation? For whom do we aspire to reflect our people's death? For whose entertainment shall we sing our agony? In what hopes? That the destroyers, aspiring to extinguish us, will suffer conciliatory remorse at the sight of their own fantastic success? The last imbecile to dream such dreams is dead, killed by the saviours of his dreams. Such idiot hopes come from a territory far beyond rebirth. Those utterly dead, never again to wake, such is their muttering. Leave them in their graves. Whatever waking form they wear, the stench of death pours ceaseless from their mouths. From every opening of their possessed carcasses comes death's excremental pus. Their soul itself is dead and long since putrified. Would you have your intercourse with these creatures from the graveyard?"
Ayi Kwei Armah
Two Thounited snakesnd Seasons
"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....Have we not seen the devotees of death? They are beyond the source's beckoning. Purpose has no power to draw them foward from dead todays. Make way for them along the easy road. Those with their guts cracked out of them, those with minds so minced all their remembrance would turn to pain, leave them along the easy road. Do not condemn, do not pity them. Let them go. Or would you try reminding them of their murdered selves? As well graft black blighted leaves. Some restful night after the first thounited snakesnd and the second thounited snakesnd seasons the loss of such, devoted to whiteness in their souls, will appear justly: a gain."
Ayi Kwei Armah
Two Thounited snakesnd Seasons
"If I see things unseen by those who have eyes, why should my wisest speech not be silence?"
Ayi Kwei Armah
Fragments
"Parents willing to be slaves should have children born to be slaves, for they deserved them."
Ayi Kwei Armah
Two Thounited snakesnd Seasons
"For he is no liberator whose skill lies in calling loudly to the bound, the trapped, the impotent enslaved, to rise upon their destroyers. The liberator is he who from a necessary silence, from a necessary secrecy strikes the destroyer. That, not loudness, is the necessary beginning."
Ayi Kwei Armah
Two Thounited snakesnd Seasons
"Endless our struggle must seem to those whose vision reaches only to the end of today."
Ayi Kwei Armah
"If a body and soul are working together the mind thinks: I should do this; the will decides: I will do it; the muscle tenses itself to help the will; and the hand does what the mind has thought. Everything works together. But say there is a bone broken in the body. The mind may think something; the will may desire it; but when the muscle tries to move the hand, there are two pieces of the broken bone pushing against each other, fighting each other, instead of working together. This is disease. The cure of that kind of disease is one of the first steps in healing.[...]There is disease which comes from conflict between body and soul in the same individual. That is more serious. It takes much longer to cure. Years, usually."
Ayi Kwei Armah
"But how shall we explain this disease? Let sleep and death again give us an image. The mind is the soul's conciliator with the body, the guide to keep the awakened body and soul together. In sleep, in death, body and soul are apart. The body may fall victim to attack. The body may fall victim to an alien conqueror. The mind can also suffer atttack, the mind can also fall to conquest. A mind attacked and conquered is guided easily away from the paths of its own soul. The body is then cut off from its spirit as in sleep, yet still instinct with the conqueror's imposed commands, a soulless thing, but active. In this state of souldeath the body blindly, sleepily obeys the conqueror. Such a body is set to persist in such obedience even if its conqueror be a distance of days and days away, a time of seasons separate. Such are zombis."
Ayi Kwei Armah
"Their first appearance among us was that of beggars. Haggard they came, betrayed and lonely in their hunger of soul and body. We pitied them, for is it not a part of the way that the stranger shall be given sustenance and helped along his road? But the way is not a partial remembrance only. How was it forgotten then that it is also part of the way, insepaAmwle from every other part, that the guest who turns contemptuous is a guest no longer but a parasite? How was it forgotten that hosts who spread a welcome for parasites prepared their own destruction?"
Ayi Kwei Armah
"Chief among the parasites were the ostentatious cripples, [those] who for no other reason than the need to veil their own atrophy of spirit wanted to be raised higher than everybody else even if that raising was merely the pushing down of all of us."
Ayi Kwei Armah
"Have we not seen the devotees of death? They are beyond the source's beckoning. Purpose has no power to draw them forward from dead todays. Make way for them along the easy road. Those with their guts cracked out of them, those with minds so minced all their remembrance would turn to pain, leave them along the easy road. Do not condemn, do not pity them. Let them go. Or would you try reminding them of their murdered selves? As well graft back blighted leaves. Some restful night after the first thounited snakesnds and the second thounited snakesnd seasons the loss of such, devoted to whiteness (death) in their souls, will appear justly: a gain."
Ayi Kwei Armah
"The events that have shattered our people were not
simply painful events. They were disasters. They
were strange, unnatural catastrophes. Those who
survived them could only survive in part because they
found ways to forget the catastrophes. When you're
still close to past dangers that threatened to wipe
you out, even remembrance pains you. Our people
forgot a lot of things in order to survive. We even
went beyond forgetfulness. To forget thoroughly the
shattering and the dispersal of a people that was once
whole, we have gone so far as to pretend we have
always been these silly little fragments each calling
itself a nation....[Forgetfulness] is natural, but
only for a while, not for all time. Forgetfulness
helps the diseased cross over the time of greatest
pain. It is a sort of sleep, like the sleep brought
on by herbs to help a sick man rest when his disease
has exhausted him. In that case forgetfulness works
towards health. But when the period of forgetfulness
is prolonged unnaturally, then it doesn't work towards
health. It works toward death....Sleep is
natural...even when it comes after unnatural
disasters. But waking is even more natural. Healers
are just awakeners of a people who have slept too
long. The awakening is natural. Healing work is part
of nature. Very much a part....There will always be
work for healers, even when the highest work is done.
That highest work, the bringing together again of the
black people, will take centuries....Often, our
confusion comes merely from impatience. The disease
has run unchecked through centuries. Yet sometimes we
dream of ending it in our little lifetimes, and
despair seizes us if we do not see the end in
sight...A healer needs to see beyond the present and
tomorrow. He needs to see years and decades ahead.
Because healers work for results so firm they may not
be wholly visible till centuries have flowed into
millennia. Those willing to do this necessary work,
they are the healers of our people."
- Ayi Kwei Armah
"It is very easy to get used to what is terrible."
- Ayi Kwei Armah
THE RETURN
The pressing needs of the time after our first escape from the destroyers' proffered destiny left little time for rest, little time for conversation. That little time was consumed in the search of kindred spirits reaching for each other.
Of ultimate directions, along which paths we would turn the remainder of our lives, to the realization of what long vision we would bend our energies, of that we had had no time to talk...
It was no hurried passage, this conversation of discovery. It took careful time, and at the end of this sufficient time we heard among us three kinds of voices uttering three separate visions.
First spoke the voices of tired bodies, voices seeing happiness in the present situation [after escaping whitey enslavers], unwilling to risk a return [to the villages that sold them in the first place] to the dangers of known pasts, afraid to follow any future vision. Those whose spirits found their utterance in the message of these voices chose to stay and continue in this new home. They were a third of us.
The second range of voices drew the most spirits, far more than a third of the whole. What dream did these voices utter? Returning was their dream. Strongest for these spirits was the call to return, the unequivocal call simply to go back to the places where mothers had borne them, places where fathers' brothers had dug from these places, from these homes, and it mattered little, the thought that destruction had reached into these very homes to blight them. To the listening ears of these nostalgic souls it did not matter, could not matter that it was at home they had first been betrayed into destruction's whiteness. Perhaps it was also their hope that their specific betrayals, their single sales were mere unhappy accidents, forgettable, easy to forget once the return home had been accomplished, once beloved ones could see again the eyes of loving ones so recently betrayed, now miraculously returning, not wiped out, only grazed by death?
Ah, blind illusion of nostalgic spirits. Ah, self-murdering deafness of ears forever cut off from the quite, reasonable call of our way. Most, far more than a third of the whole, chose to listen to the voices calling betrayed spirits back to betraying homes.
Far less than a third of us were left to drink in the meaning of the third voice. What was the meaning of this voice that called us?
Its farthest meaning, that meaning large enough to hold all other meanings, was the meaning of the way itself: the call to reciprocity in a world wiped clean of destroyers, innocent again of predators. What was the meaning of the call to the way? Its closer meaning was destruction's destuction. Its closest meaning: the search for paths to that necessary beginning...
There was no blind groping backwards along any nostalgic road. This was to be nothing stupid, nothing futile. This was not to be a static holding on to that security - ultimately directionless - we had found in the present. The present station had been kind, more than kind: perfect for ourselves when rest was what we needed, when we were not yet recovered from the sicknesses leading into the whiteness of death. Remaining would be a choice of the permanent life of invalids. Better to leave the nostalgic along their backward road. Better to leave those frightened of vision in the static comfort they had found. Better to work out better directions, to follow better visions in our salvaged lives.
...No, we would not return to homes blasted with triumphant whiteness. We would not remain here in invalid security...We would seek the necessary beginning to destruction's destruction.
...Peering into our people's soul, what was this destiny we saw after so long spurning? This. It is our destiny not to flee before destruction, not to wander impotent, our soul turned coward, our bodies mere vessels for the demonstration of a massive impotence. This is our destiny: however far in our blind anxiety we may think to fly, however distant the places we reach seeking an unconscionable quiet, there the predators, there the harbingers of destruction will find us.
It is our destiny not to flee the predators' thrust, not to seek hiding places from destroyers left triumphant; but to turn against the predators advancing, turn against the destroyers, and begin all our soul against their thrust, turning every stratagem of the destroyers against themselves, destroy them. That is our destiny: to end destruction - utterly; to begin the highest, the profoundest work of creation, the work that is insepaAmwle from our way, insepaAmwle from they way.
This has been no useless explosion of rage animating us, hurling us singly into the brief, senseless acts of momentary, particular revenge. In us has been the need to spend life against the present killing arrangements, destuction's established system; to spend life cutting through deceiving superficies to reach again the essential truths the destroyers must hide from spirits if their white road is to prevail; to spend life acting on the truth against destruction's whiteness; to spend life working with our people, searching for paths to our way.
This should be the lifework of spirits still open to the remembrance of the way, capable already of visions of its rediscovery, willing, determined to make it a living way again.
Vision is the aim of this vocation: the clearing of destruction's pale, thick-lying pus from eyes too long blinded to every possibility of the way. This lifework, its fruit should be the birth of new seers, other hearers, more numerous utterers. And the fruit of all our lifework together: that should be destruction's destruction.
And the passage of seasons? What of that? This is no hurried hustle hot with the sweaty anticipation of impatient profit but a lifetime's vocation. This is work of undying worth, the only work of worth in these surroundings blighted with death's tinsel, in all truth. It is not the passage of seasons that concerns this vocation then. It is the thoroughness of work, the trueness of the search for our way, the way."
Ayi Kwei Armah
Two Thounited snakesnd Seasons
"The third day early in the morning the great drums were beaten. The people assembled and were a little heartened to see the speaker this time would be Isanusi himself, best spokesman, of whom it was said truth was his food. Isanusi looked tired, like a man who had spent days and nights without sleep with no comfort for a punished body and no rest for a mind wrestling with heavy matters. Isanusi walked to the centre of the public place, greeted the people with respect but as briefly as he could, and began at once:
I have been unwilling to speak at all. The king persuaded me I would be betraying our people if I held back my voice at such a time. I will not betray our people.
'It is about the white men. You have seen them. They have brought to the king and his courtiers greetings and presents. Those also you have seen. And they have brought requests, which the king bids me lay open to you for your thinking on. The king wishes you to know beforehand that as far as he himself is concerned - and that goes for his courtiers too - his heart responds kindly to all the white men's wishes, and he is of a mind to grant them. Of the white men's killing of our people they bade me say nothing. I was bidden to speak to you only of the men's wishes.
The first wish of the white men is this: they have heard of our land, of the beauty of the mountains and the plains' fertility here, and of the metals our earth contains - iron in abundance, gold, silver, and our pure, red copper. These metals it is the white men's wish to take away from us, to take them to their home beyond the sea. In return they promise to give the king and his courtiers shiny things, entertainment for their eyes. They would have us break up the mountains, take out what is good in them to give them, leaving ourselves here the waste sand.
The people assembled murmured their astonishment, but they respected the custom forbidding any interruption at a time like this. As for the king he was still in his palace with his guests the white men.
This is the white men's second wish,' Isanusi continued. They have been told of the forests here and of the grasslands; of the birds and animals we have roaming the land. It is the white men's wish to have us help them kill these birds and these animals. They do not want their flesh for food. The elephants they say they want destroyed, but only for their tusks. There is a hunter among the white men, and a trader. These tow say tusks can be sold for riches. Leopards they want dead for their hides. As for our gazelles, they would kill them to use their heads for decoration.
You have heard me. The white men, guests of the king, would have us destroy our mountains, then our animals, and give them what is of use to themselves, leaving here the offal. In return they would reward the king with gifts, the king together with his courtiers.
There is a third wish the white men have made. Land they want from us, but not the way guests ask the use of land. The white men want land cut off from other land and set apart for them, as if land could ever be a thing belonging to any but the people as a whole. On this their cut-off land they would like to have crops grow. But the white men are not accustomed to doing their own planting and it is not in their minds to get accustomed here. They would have the king give them men to work the land - I use their language, for they think the king owns men he can give away to others - so that to speak truth ours would be the planting and the caring, theirs, the harvest and its profit. In return they would reward the king and his courtiers with more gifts.
Listen to their fourth wish. The white men say they have heard we have many people here - too many, they say - and that our women's fertility is reported a wonder among them. It is their wish to take numbers of our people away from us. They say these numbers would in the new places beyond the sea work on land as ours here...'
Hear now the last wish of the white men. They have a road they follow, and something called a god they worship - not the living spirit there is in everything but a creature separate, raised above all surrounding things, to hear them speak of it rather like a bloated king. It is the white men's wish to take us from our way - ah, we ourselves are so far already from our way - to move us on to their road; to void us of our soul and put their spirit, the worship of their creature god, in us. For this they do not think it will be necessary to reward to the king and his courtiers. They say it will be reward enough when we have lost our way completely, lost even our names; when you will call your brother not Olu but John, not Kofi but Paul; and our sisters will no longer be Ama, Naita, Idawa and Ningome but creatures called Cecilia, Esther, Mary, Elizabeth and Christina.
Hear now the end. The white men wish us to destroy our mountains, leaving ourselves wastes of barren sand. The white men wish us to wipe out our animals, leaving ourselves carcasses rotting into white skeletons. The white men want us to take human beings, our sisters and our sons, and turn them into laboring things. The white men want us to take human beings, our daughter and our brothers, and turn them into slaves. The white men want us to obliterate our remembrances of our way, the way, and in its place to follow their road, road of destruction, road of a stupid, childish god.'
From:
"Two Thounited snakesnd Seasons" by Ayi Kwei Armah pgs. 82, 83, 84
"The whole world is covered over with the hell of eureurasia."
Ayi Kwei Armah
Why Are We So Blest?
"There is no beauty but in relationships. Nothing cut off by
itself is beautiful. Never can things in destructive
relationships be beautiful. All beauty is in the creative
purpose of our relationships; all ugliness is in the
destructive aims of the destroyers' arrangements. The mind
that knows this, the destroyers will set traps for it, but
the destroyers' traps will never hold that mind. The group that
knows this and works knowing this, that group itself is a
work of beauty, Creation's work. Against such a group the
destroyers will set traps for the body, traps for the heart,
traps to destroy the mind. Such a group none of the
destroyers' traps can hold."
- Ayi Kwei Armah
Two Thounited snakesnd Seasons
Translation of Ayi Kwei Armah's Two Thounited snakesnd Seasons into Akan (Twi)
Translation of Ayi Kwei Armah's Two Thounited snakesnd Seasons into Akan (Twi)
Nnianim (Prologue)
Mmasuo a [ch949]rek[ch596] anweatam h[ch596], koransan a worek[ch596] yi de[ch949] owunyane biara nni h[ch596]. Anweatam no di fadie. Anhweatam nnim adiama. W'ayamyesuo a [ch949]sen h[ch596] de[ch949], [ch949]ny[ch949] anweatam [ch596]brasu mu s[ch949] [ch949]tumi san ma wo biribi gye ad[ch596]kum mu ades[ch949]e. Asuwa mu nsuo a [ch949]resen k[ch596] anweatam h[ch596] no, ogyam', nt[ch596]rease[ch949] da w'anim.
Ao! nnipa a [ch949]rek[ch596] owia at[ch596]e[ch949] h[ch596], saa kwan so na owus[ch596]re ho anidaso[ch596] biara asa na [ch949]ntumi mma da. [ch400]h[ch596] na owusomfo[ch596] hwim nkwa, hwere koraa na yiyi nkwa firi ahihi ne ahaha nyinaa. Afei na s[ch949][ch949]fo[ch596] tu k[ch596] baabi fofor[ch596] hwehw[ch949] ahye[ch949] fofor[ch596] bi da biara daa. Baabiara a nkwa nkae bi da h[ch596] a w[ch596]annya nnw[ch949]re no a, dwuma bi da h[ch596] ma w[ch596]n. Biribiara a anka [ch949]rek[ch596] owia at[ch596]e[ch949] h[ch596] de[ch949], owusini nsonso retw[ch949]n w[ch596]n. Nnipa biara a w[ch596]ma saa at[ch596]e[ch949] h[ch596] ogya y[ch949] w[ch596]n botae[ch949] no, nt[ch596]rease[ch949] retw[ch949]n w[ch596]n w[ch596] as[ch949]efo[ch596] ntamu w[ch596] h[ch596].
Dammirifua! Wo, ansuaniwa a adiama hia wo, wo a wo nsuo yiri k[ch596] anweatam h[ch596]. Due! Ntamu-sen-suo a [ch949]regye nsuaniwa mmasuo de ama asuten a apem k[ch596] [ch596]s[ch949]e[ch949] h[ch596], de[ch949] [ch949]rehwehw[ch949] nt[ch596]rease[ch949].
Mo a mo w[ch949]n mo aso, mo a mohunu ade[ch949], mo a mosusu biribi ho, mo a modwene biribi ho, mo a mokae as[ch949]m, mo a mo hy[ch949] nk[ch596]m a y[ch949]afr[ch949] mo s[ch949] montu[ch949] nnipa a owuo y[ch949] w[ch596]n nwantanwanta aso w[ch596] nkwa-kwan ho nokor[ch949]s[ch949]m, mo a y[ch949]afr[ch949] mo s[ch949] monka nkae ne atiekan bom, s[ch949] momfa mmer[ch949] nkyeky[ch949]mu a [ch949]ny[ch949] ano-bi-ni toatoa [ch596]kyena dodo[ch596] a obi nnim mus[ch949]m no so, adawurub[ch596]fo[ch596] a y[ch949]adome mo s[ch949] monka y[ch949]n fibea[ch949] ho nokor[ch949]s[ch949]m nkyer[ch949] nnipa a [ch949]reb[ch596] kirididi ak[ch596] owuo h[ch596], w[ch596]n a s[ch949]nea w[ch596]ab[ch596]n afa y[ch949]n ab[ch596]se[ch949] ho ama y[ch949]ab[ch596] kweurasiare, ama y[ch949]n akyeade[ch949] ay[ch949] y[ch949]n akyiwade[ch949], na obi b[ch949]tie wo dwuma mu kaase[ch949]b[ch596] no s[ch949]n?
Abrab[ch596] akansie nie, nanso y[ch949]b[ch949]kaekae nnipa a owusunsum asi w[ch596]n so[ch596] s[ch949]n? Y[ch949]ataa at[ch596]e[ch949] h[ch596] owia aky[ch949], a [ch949]resen ak[ch596] anweatam h[ch596], a y[ch949]rekanyane y[ch949]n ho ak[ch596] y[ch949]n sie[ch949] no.
Nkwa mu anadwo a y[ch949]n nne reba afiri y[ch949]n ab[ch596]se[ch949] no mu. Y[ch949]k[ch596]hwehw[ch949] y[ch949]n tiefo[ch596] bue y[ch949]n ano ak[ch596]ka as[ch949]m a y[ch949]ate. Nanso woowoo k[ch949]se[ch949] to y[ch949]n so[ch596]. Dede a w[ch596]n a owusunsum asi w[ch596]n so y[ch949] no na aboro so [ch949]nam abodan biara mu akwakoraa nnyeso[ch596] w[ch596] y[ch949]n afiasep[ch596]n a y[ch949]n w[ch596] mu yi ntira, saa nnyegyee[ch949] ano y[ch949] den mp[ch949]n apem sen nnyegyee[ch949] a y[ch949]de ba.
Y[ch949]n nne afa, y[ch949]tu asu b[ch596] y[ch949]n kaase[ch949] a [ch949]fa [ch596]kwan no ho. atwetwesi mu na kirididib[ch596] d[ch596]m te[ch949]m moma owuo. Wiase anom adutoduru fitaa ama owuo anigyetraso aba mu ber[ch949] a aho[ch596]demfidie y[ch949] dede basabasa kwan so de b[ch596] gyegyeegye fofor[ch596] no ho w[ch596] at[ch596]e[ch949] h[ch596] owia ase[ch949]. Dwabum sakasaka yi akyi, biribiara a y[ch949]de tu asu nsi hwee, y[ch949]ka as[ch949]m a, [ch949]nka. W[ch596] nokor[ch949] mu, w[ch596][ch596]w[ch596][ch596] yi gye oniiko a anka [ch596]b[ch949]b[ch596] mu pae ne k[ch596]n so ntini. Ne nkra at[ch596] ansa na y[ch949]awo no, [ch596]te[ch949]mfo[ch596] boa saa sakasakay[ch949] no.
Amankwa, mmasuo a wo nsuo hwie gu [ch596]s[ch949]e[ch949] kwan so s[ch949] asub[ch596]nten a [ch949]repem k[ch596], wo daakye y[ch949] [ch596]s[ch949]e[ch949], wo mprempren y[ch949] [ch596]ma, [ch596]ma a [ch949]k[ch596] ohunu mu a asangye nni h[ch596] Wo sen nnim awus[ch596]re.
Kaanse [ch949]y[ch949] asuwa suban ne s[ch949] [ch949]ma ade[ch949]; [ch949]y[ch949] anweatam anwea suban s[ch949] [ch949]fa ade[ch949]. Kaanse senee na [ch949]y[ch949] w'ayamyesuo suban no; saa na [ch949]mem y[ch949] anweatam suban.
Mmom, wo ay[ch949]su nso di gye[ch949]. [ch390]ma, ogye[ch949], ogye[ch949], [ch596]ma, atoaso, abrab[ch596]. [ch390]ma mfra nhwea-so [ch596]brasuo no mu bi. [ch390]fa, [ch596]fa, [ch596]fa, [ch596]fa, anweatam de ne s[ch949]e[ch949] s[ch949]es[ch949]es[ch949]es[ch949]e biribiara a [ch949]ka no ho. De[ch949] [ch949]tu ne ho ky[ch949] anweatam biara agyae awunyane.
Asuwa s[ch949] ma. Asuwa s[ch949] sen. Nanso, s[ch949] asuwa toa ne nsuma ne ne nsusen no so a, anka anweatam h[ch596] kwan ny[ch949] [ch596]kwan pa bi.Anweatam h[ch596] kwan so na mmauo mu nsu y[ch949] duamono mu asonsuaa a [ch949]rete abunu hyehye framframfram, a anka akita nkwa dwoodwoo, afiri ntini tiri de rek[ch596] nkor[ch596]batawa tiri w[ch596] esum mu a adafitwa apia ak[ch596] amemeneban hann bi mu ama adane mogya-su-fene hyehyeehye a [ch949]rehinam akyer[ch949] [ch949]no ara ne duabans[ch949]e. Anweatam h[ch596] kwan na mmasuo mu nsuo y[ch949] [ch596]baa kuntunsini ho mogya w[ch596] ber[ch949] bi a [ch596]maanam de ne ho ka ha ama onwunu atom'.
Mmasuo nni h[ch596] a [ch949]tumi dane anweatam ani. Anweatam ka h[ch596] daa; mmasuo na [ch949]b[ch949]wo. [ch400]ny[ch949] asuten baako, [ch949]ny[ch949] aduasa, [ch949]ny[ch949] apem na [ch949]b[ch949]tumi adane anweatam ani. Nsakrae bi b[ch949]ba mu saa a, anka nsuyiri, ab[ch596]de[ch949] mu asu-santen a aka bom' nyinaa a [ch949]rensen nk[ch596]sr[ch949] anweatam, a [ch949]resen s[ch949] [ch949]b[ch949]bunkam koraa. [ch400]no na [ch949]hia mmom, na [ch949]ny[ch949] asuwa-ko a [ch949]tumi dane asuwo(w).
[ch390]ma, ogye[ch949], ogye[ch949], [ch596]ma, biribiara a nkwa w[ch596] mu y[ch949] nta. Hwan na anka [ch596]b[ch949]tumi a yi owu-nkonyaa, ma [ch596]yaako ky[ch949] mu mmienu. Biribiara a [ch949]ntumi mma, biribiara a [ch949]nnim adegye[ch949] mpo, a [ch949]nim [ch7885]fa nko ara, saa ade[ch949] no na apa n'ankasa ne wuo. [ch400]y[ch949] owukurafo[ch596]. Dammirifua due, ademafo[ch596] a [ch949]nam saa [ch596]fafo[ch596] ne kwan so, [ch949]siane s[ch949], afei saa t[ch596]fo[ch596] anya ne nkonim mu t[ch596]fowusin.
Monnue, nnipakuo a [ch949]de ad[ch596]esator[ch596] ma ne ho nno[ch596]ma w[ch596] ayamyetraso mu, a afa [ch596]kwantemp[ch596]n bi so a [ch949]ny[ch949] nsiforo kwan na [ch949]y[ch949] n'ankasa ne nt[ch596]rease[ch949] kwan. Dammirifua due, nnipakuo, dammirifua due asuwa. Due asutiri, due adehufo[ch596], due as[ch949]ntefo[ch596], due as[ch949]nkafo[ch596]. Due mmasuo, nnipa a [ch949]reb[ch596] kirididi ak[ch596] Baamoa Owuo h[ch596].
[ch400]de[ch949]n koraa na [ch949]ka h[ch596]? Ahonu nnwonto[ch596], Nananom Nsamanfo[ch596] ho nnome na w[ch596] saa abrab[ch596]-s[ch949]-at[ch949]ky[ch949] abrab[ch596] mu gya akyirimma a y[ch949]annya nwo w[ch596]n saa atoyer[ch949]nky[ch949]m a y[ch949]reka ho as[ch949]m yi? Saa kwadwofo[ch596] asetena y[ch949] mmer[ch949], asabo(w) asetena a y[ch949]de tw[ch949]n owuo. Nsianee kwank[ch596] y[ch949] mmer[ch949] ma adekaefo[ch596] mpo.
Y[ch949]n a y[ch949]tie saa mma-wo-wer[ch949]-mfiri-wo-ay[ch949]su [ch596]fr[ch949] yi koraa, asa y[ch949]antwa ho adafi w[ch596] awudifo[ch596] owiagyinae hyehyeehye a y[ch949] w[ch596] mu yi? Nno[ch596]ma pepeankoma di y[ch949]n ho barehyia a w[ch596] de totoo h[ch596] a [ch949]di y[ch949]n brasu asi, de[ch949] [ch949]toa nk[ch596]nk[ch596]kyenenne[ch949] ma y[ch949]n wer[ch949] afiri y[ch949]n ho, de[ch949] [ch949]to y[ch949]n brad[ch949] s[ch949] y[ch949]b[ch949]k[ch596] [ch596]s[ch949]e[ch949] fitaa no mu. Y[ch949]n nso na y[ch949]anom awer[ch949]firi mmoroso ama y[ch949]afra ahos[ch949]p[ch949] owuo akyiridie yi.
Y[ch949]ntumi ntoa so saa. [ch400]nam s[ch949] akyipa po, saa nnyae[ch949] a y[ch949]de gya [ch596]kwan no, saa brakyea mu aso[ch596]den de[ch949], ase[ch949] pa nni h[ch596], nkontompohunu a [ch949]nt[ch596] aso mu nko ara.
Na adehufo[ch596], as[ch949]ntefo[ch596] ne as[ch949]nkafo[ch596] [ch949]? S[ch949] y[ch949]b[ch949]tumi ate ber[ch949] nkyeky[ch949]mu kitikiti nko ara de[ch949] a, [ch949]b[ch949]so s[ch949]n? S[ch949] y[ch949]b[ch949]tumi ahunu basabasa a [ch949]twa y[ch949]n ho hyia nko ara a y[ch949]kasa te s[ch949] ahwehw[ch949]-kuntun, akokoraa nnyeso[ch596]...
"And yet it happens that the beginnings of creation are hard to tell apart from mere destruction. This too should not escape our rememberance: the way is not an old road ready for consumers to travel on; the way is a call to creation. Easy it is to fall into the trap of loneliness if we forget that our people are not just of the present, not just the walking multitudes of murdered souls and zombis around us, but many, many more gone and many many more to come. Because it is useless to locate hope in the already destroyed; it is a method of the lazy hypocritical soul, courting despair so as to spare itself the necessity of action. As reasonable it would be to visit cemeteries, there to wait upon the dead to rise to our conversation. Yes, there are many whose semblance of life is all trapped within the present death. But what are we if their numbers alone, should depress us into immobility? What are we if we see nothing beyond the present, hear nothing from the ages of our flowing, and in all our existence can utter no necessary preparation for the future?
Certain it is decay runs exulting through our people, certain we have fallen into a grotesque dance of death, the dance of whites and kings and princes and other worms and parasites. But shall we call Idawa foolish urging us to remember even mortal bodies can destroy the lice infesting them? That our people will live, and will necessarily destroy the white destroyers infesting us together with their helpers and parasites?"
--Armah
"The white destroyers: what a scene of carnage, what utter desolation they have already left stretching over this land! What a destruction of bodies, what a death of spirit! But the reign of the destroyers cannot reach beyond these two thounited snakesnd seasons. The predators from the desert, they who found so much to do among us turning living bodies to carrion, what are they now? a bizarre sort of egrets feast impudent on their very eyeballs in other deserts they once called their own. Thirty hundred seasons consumed in the lazy oppression of other people have killed their minds. All they can be now is willing instruments of worse predators than themselves, of destroyers even greedier. And the white destroyers from the sea, the worst there are, what of them? Their reign is surely bound within the two thounited snakesnd seasons of our oppression. For their greed is preparing deep graves for them; it will raise against them the torrential wrath of all things in the universe, all bodies, all souls still with the seed of life unkilled in them. Were they not on their way to spread death elsewhere when their gluttony brought them here? Their greed is far flung, far beyond our land. Other lands have burned in their insatiate avarice, other peoples have died in the whiteness of their greed. In those other places surely other survivors have awakened from the whiteness of the trance of death. Others devoted to life will surely find that between the creation of life and the destruction of the destroyers there is no difference but a necessary, indispensable connection; that nothing good can be created that does not of its very nature push forward the destruction of the destroyers. And in that urge to live, in that fight against destruction's ashen blight each people of the way will find every other people of the way.
Dangers there will be in the newness of this discovery, dangers like the headiness of too quick, abundant faith from those too long sold to despair, the pull of old habits from destruction's empire; the sour possibility of people helping each other turning in times of difficulty into people using each other to create a selfish ease. Real dangers, but nothing beside the present danger of despair in the face of the illusion, massive, stone-like, of the permanence of this white destruction."
Armah
"We do not utter the praise of arms. The praise of arms is the praise of things, and what shall we call the soul crawling so low, soul so hollow it finds fulfilment in the praising of mere things? It is not things we praise in our utterance, not arms we praise but the living relationship itself of those united in the use of all things against the white sway of death, for creation's life. That is the beauty of the seers vision, that alone is music to the hearers ear. That is the sole utterance of utterers conscious of our way, the way. Whatever thing, whatever relationship, whatever consciousness takes us along paths closer to our way, whatever goes against the white destroyers empire, that thing only is beautiful, that relationship only is truthful, that consciousness alone has satisfaction for the still living mind."
Armah
"We too have not been immune to calls of the flesh, calls to tired minds to give up thoughts of creation when all around has become a praise song to destruction. Against the testing hardness of life on paths to the way strong and sweet indeed to the blinded mind are the calls of despair, and often has our contemplation of this present world and its arrangements lent heavy weight to such despair. Always, the counter to that despair has been in deeper contemplation of the universe, in contemplation bearing action. Let despair run its course; there is no need to cut it short. The present chances that frigthen, let contemplation of these same chances be definite, clear, sustained and deep. That is what removes the fear. For the knowledge of all the chances piled against us fighting against death is also sure knowledge that if fear turned us from fighting the chances would not decrease just for that. They would increase. That other call, the raw fear of death? That too is strong, overpowering almost, at times. Again the exit from fear is to let the mind enjoy its freedom to thrust deep, contemplating that most frightening eventuality known to the cut-off self: death. For the mind untrammeled reaches this knowledge: that in these surroundings usurped by destruction the distinction is not between those dying and those not dying in our physical selves, but in the quality of the deaths we choose. There are those whose physical death is at the same time the triumph of destruction's road. There are those whose physical death is a necessary preparation for a profounder life, life of our people, life of our way, the way."
Armah