"An African Focus": A Study of Ayi Kwei Armah's Narrative Africanization (review)

"An African Focus": A Study of Ayi Kwei Armah's Narrative Africanization, by Leif Lorentzon. Stockholm: Almqvist and Wiksell, 1998. 221 pp. ISSN 049-0869/ISBN 91-22-01768-2

Leif Lorentzon has written a comprehensively researched, but pedestrian and ultimately inconsequential study of narrative strategies in Ayi Kwei Armah's fiction. Published under the Acta Universitatis Stockholmiensis imprint (No. 37 in the series "Stockholm Studies in History of Literature"), the monograph represents Lorentzon's doctoral thesis, completed at Stockholm University in 1997.

An obvious problem faced by anybody who sets out to write on an author as well-known as Armah is that of saying something new. Books on Armah have previously been published by Robert Fraser (1980), Derek Wright (1989), myself (1990), Kofi Yankson (1994), and Tommie Lee Jackson (1996). Wright has also edited a collection of critical essays (1992). Lorentzon has read all of these books. Indeed, he seems to have read just about everything published by or on Armah. He has even tracked down some unpublished memoranda that Armah wrote to members of the English Department at the National University of Lesotho during his years on the faculty there in the late 1970s, and has consulted two dozen unpublished doctoral dissertations directed wholly or in part to Armah's work.

Despite all this exhaustive research, Lorentzon does not manage to add very much to the existing literature on Armah. His study sets out to analyze changes in the mode of narration across Armah's first five novels, by way not merely of classifying these changes formally but of assessing the degree to which they correspond to a progressive "narrative Africanization." (Armah's sixth novel, Osiris Rising, appeared too late to be incorporated into the study. A separate chapter on this novel appears at the end of the monograph.) Lorentzon knows, naturally, that to propose a principle of "Africanization" across Armah' s work is scarcely the stuff of which academic scandals are made. Indeed, he acknowledges that his hypothesis represents something of a critical truism. What he aims to do, therefore, is to focus not on "whether or why" Armah "has used various narrative strategies as an African kind of creativity," but on how he has done so (18). But to the extent that Lorentzon demonstrates an unwillingness to ask the hard philosophical questions that need to be asked in this respect--concerning especially the differentia specifica of this "African kind of creativity"--this course of action unfortunately commits him, much of the time, to a painful elaboration of the obvious. He tells us, for example, that because of the presence of a griot figure in Two Thousand Seasons and The Healers, readers tend to find these novels "more African" than the earlier The Beautyful Ones (105)! By the same token, he tells us that Armah's authorial decision to make Densu "a common man and not a royal person" in The Healers does not bespeak an "affinity" on the novelist's part to "Western epics" (who ever supposed it did?), but has more to do with ideology (76)! And he observes solemnly that Two Thousand Seasons is "[p]erhaps . . . the kind of novel a griot would write if he had access to a written language and a literary tradition" (134)--a proposition that seems to me either vacuous or absurd.

I do not mean to suggest that this study is altogether without insight. On the contrary, Lorentzon does rather well, for instance, to demonstrate that Baako's existential plight in Fragments is irreducibly an African one. And he convincingly draws out the implications of Armah's repudiation of the Prometheus myth in Why Are We So Blest? But these and similar insights represent relatively modest achievements. And they do not come cheap, for in order to find them, the reader has first to wade through page after page of plot summary, formalist analysis, and literally...