Book: The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born
Author: Ayi Kwei Armah
Publication Year: 1968
Genre: Fiction
Country: Ghana
Book: Search Sweet Country
Author: Kojo Laing
Publication Year: 1986
Genre: Fiction
Country: Ghana
Book: Homegoing/Transcendent Kingdom
Author: Yaa Gyasi
Publication Year: 2016/2020
Genre: Fiction
It is an interesting exercise to compare the countries of modern Africa to the states and provinces of North America. What you observe is a mirror image of one another. Demarcated borders that start small close to their Atlantic coastlines but which grow increasingly larger as they expand into their respective continents. Tiny Connecticut, Rhode Island and Massachusetts give way to the behemoths of Arizona, New Mexico and Texas: Slivers of land called Guinea, Togo, Sierra Leone and the like, all of which could be swallowed several times over by Chad or the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
Here we see the afterimage of colonialism. Relatively minor land grabs that became more and more ambitious as their indigenous populations were slaughtered or sold into slavery or brought under the boot of the imperial heel. Or some combination of all three.
Nestled between Ivory Coast (Côte d'lvoire) to the west and Togo to the east, Ghana is an important place in the history of Great Britain’s part in the trans-Atlantic slave trade. For many in West Africa, the Ghanaian coast and the various forts and castles built along its coastline were their last sight of Africa before being shipped to America and the Caribbean. Though as the country’s former name, the Gold Coast, attests, European explorers from the Portuguese to the Dutch came to this part of the world in search of commodities other than people.
Yaa Gyasi’s 2016 novel, Homegoing, speaks to this history. Told through the diverging fortunes of a single family, one set of descendents remain in Ghana and experience colonialism and tribal conflict. The other line is sold into slavery and bears witness to the expanding fortunes of the United States. Only at the end of the novel, which takes in two hundred years of Ghanaian and American history, do the two family lines come to be reunited. Although the mists of time leave no trace of their shared history.
It starts with Effia, who as a teenager is ‘married’ off to the British governor of the local fort. Her descendents will remain in Ghana. Unknown to Effia, her half sister, Eli, is imprisoned in the dungeons beneath the castle and shipped across the ocean. Her descendents will live through the plantations, the underground railroad, the Runaway Slave Act, the Civil War, reconstruction, Jim Crow and the Civil Rights movement.
Alternate chapters move between Ghanaian and American episodes, through eight generations on either side of the Atlantic. Each chapter is named after the point of view character, which I always find a little hack, but at least it isn’t cycling through the same three characters like much of modern sci-fi and fantasy (George R R Martin has a lot to answer for).
Homegoing is one of the best books I have read in this project. Three hundred pages that fly by in an instant (I read it in two sessions in less than twenty four hours). It packs so much history, character and plot into such a short space of time that most writers would struggle to fit into a book twice its size. In many ways, it can’t even be called a novel but a series of short stories that are only loosely connected at the margins. Still, for a first novel it is a towering achievement.
The novel is told in a mixture of present day narrative and flashback. Gifty’s mother has come to stay with her but refuses to get out of bed. As the novel unfolds, we come to realise why.
Transcendent Kingdom is a more straightforward kind of novel; not as good as Homegoing, not because it isn’t a good novel, but simply because Homegoing is so accomplished. Yet it is a thematic sequel to Homegoing because it manages to speak to many of the same issues connected to American and African culture. The opioid crisis of recent years is well known, as well as the scandal of the families who made billions selling OxyContin to vulnerable Americans. Regular drug dealers go to prison. Rich drug dealers do not, even though the damage they do is incalculably worse.
The novel also touches on absentee fathers in the black community, which is almost a cliché in American culture at this point, as well as the way grief takes different shapes for different people. Although the majority of the novel takes place in America, we do return to Ghana to reconnect with West Africa during the flashbacks.
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| Yaa Gyasi |
The book is comparable to many novels in world literature. The lowly civil servant who cannot survive under the oppressive, crushing pressure of the system in which he is entrenched. One has only to think of Winston Smith and Nineteen Eighty Four for a suitable comparison. The human condition is common to all from Accra to Airstrip One.
Chinua Achebe called Armah an “alienated writer complete with all the symptoms. Unfortunately Ghana is not a modern existentialist country. It is just a Western African state struggling to become a nation.” Given that Achebe‘s own Nigeria saw a number of internal conflicts during its own post-independence era, culminating in the Biafra War, which killed an estimated two million mostly Igbo people, his comments seem tone deaf and more than a little hypocritical. Novels come in all shapes and sizes. As we have said more than once in this project, it takes many points of view to give a country a voice.
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| Ayi Kwei Armah |
Search Sweet Country is one of those novels, like A Grain of Wheat (see: Kenya) that features a cavalcade of local characters whose stories slowly coalesce into one another. Like The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born, it speaks to the corruption of post-colonial Ghana and the ways its characters embrace it or struggle against it or are further disenfranchised because of it.
Perhaps more than the other books in this selection of Ghanaian writing, Laing’s first novel manages to evoke the sounds, smells and general disorder of Accra in 1975. At times it plays out like The Wandering Rocks episode of Joyce’s Ulysses, expanded to become an entire novel. A character who is the focus of one chapter is seen as a background figure in the next (and vice versa). Joyce is an appropriate comparison for Laing, who bends language and creates his own neologisms, as well as using a whole host of Ghanaian words that are collected in a glossary at the back of the book.
But this is really one thread of many woven into the book, some of which have no ending or resolution. A march to the government buildings to protest poverty in the country and political corruption is forestalled by the army presenting the large crowd with a feast in a perverse restaging of the Biblical feeding of the five thousand. There is also Kofi Loww, who is in love with a witch, and sociology professor Sackey, who dreams of being a farmer.
Why Laing chose to place the action in 1975 is unclear. But then why do authors set their novels in any period of time (I wrote a sci-fi novel set in 1998). Is it a cry for our youth or a rose tinted view of the past or, like science fiction, a way to discuss present day concerns by removing them to some other time or place?
With Search Sweet Country, I suspect Laing chose 1975 as a point equidistant in time from independence and the year in which he was writing. This way he could discuss the current state of Ghana, twenty years after the British retreated. It should be remembered that Laing was writing in the years after Flight Lieutenant Jerry John Rawlings came to power in 1981, suspending the constitution and banning political parties for the next decade. The constitution was finally restored in 1992. By 2012, the country was considered a stable democracy.
Like The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born, Search Sweet Country is a satire on Ghanaian society and perhaps West African society as a whole. It is more comical, less cynical than its literary predecessor. Armah’s unnamed clerk is so defeated at the end of The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born, you almost expect him to walk into the ocean like a character in a John Steinbeck novel. Laing’s roster of named characters experience mixed fortunes, like any novel or play with an ensemble cast.
Perhaps Chinua Achebe was right in calling Ghana a Western African state struggling to become a nation. Armah and Laing present a country struggling to forge its own path after centuries of outside interference and asset stripping of its natural resources, not least the indigenous population. The same problems persist as they do in much of Africa, but Ghana’s economy has grown out of proportion with its relatively small size, mainly due to exports of oil, gold and cocoa. I am sure the issues Armah and Laing write about still exist, probably exponentially so, but Ghana seems to be a country on the up.
Yaa Gyasi gives us the other side of the equation. If Armah and Laing are Effia’s descendents, who remained in Ghana to build a nation, Gyasi is a descendent of Eli, transported to the other side of the Atlantic (metaphorically only – she was born in Ghana and is therefore also a descendent of Effia – you get the point). Part of the myriad people who made the journey from Africa to the United States, first involuntarily and later by choice.
Through Gyasi’s novels, we see how those sold into slavery were forced to live, as well as how their descendents and later arrivals from Africa have been targeted by the same destructive forces. In many ways, what we are seeing in America right now is a direct reversal of the trans-Atlantic slave trade. The people who built the country are not even permitted to enjoy its achievements.
One wonders if the architects of this orgy of self-destruction will see the errors of their ways before the United States becomes obsolescent. But such revelations require self-awareness. There doesn’t seem to be much self-awareness in the present day American government. Just blind hatred and naked greed: Emotions completely at odds with America’s self-identification as a Christian country.
I don’t want to have to talk about this stuff, but given how many authors in this series have sort refuge and asylum in the United States over the years (see: Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, Vietnam, Cambodia, Zimbabwe, Dominican Republic), it is depressing to see those same routes being cut off by the current administration. Hopefully many, if not all of its insane proclamations will be reversed by future governments. Sadly, I suspect it will take decades to reverse the damage. China becoming a democracy is more likely and that isn’t going to happen in the foreseeable future either.
As I say, I don’t want to have to talk about these things, but this seemed like as good a time as ever. There will doubtless be other émigré writers living in the United States on this list and we will once again straddle the line between nations with differing fortunes. However, the scales have started to tip. How far will they have swung the next time we approach the Eastern Seaboard?
For now, Ghana retains its a place of importance in the history of West Africa, slavery and colonialism. After a rocky start on the road to independence, it has found its feet. As usual, it is its writers who speak to the difficulties that have been conquered and those that remain to be overcome. It is another country for which four books by three authors can’t even begin to scratch the surface. I hope to return in the not too distant future. However, there is still much of Africa and African literature to explore.
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| Kojo Laing |
