The Rhetoric of Revolution in Armah's The Healers: Form as Experience

Extract

The Healers, Ayi Kwei Armah's most recent novel (1978), has received less critical attention than it deserves given the importance of its theme—the sociopolitical liberation of Africa—and the compelling textual strategies it deploys towards that end. What scanty criticism it has attracted has concentrated only on the novelist's social vision, with the debates centering on the degree of faithfulness to the historical materials on which he bases his novel. Nevertheless, without due attention paid to the rhetoric, the peculiar idea of revolution that Armah advocates cannot be grasped fully. By rhetoric is meant the linguistic strategies employed by the writer to put his ideas forward-his style, the use of aesthetic means for achieving desired effects on the reader. This essay attempts to redress the picture and demonstrate the aesthetic elements that give Armah's novel its special stridency.

While it is true, as many critics have pointed out (Lindfors 1980, 91; Fraser 1980, 83-86; Wright 1989, 244-47), that The Healers uses the fall of the Ashanti empire in the 19th century as a paradigm of how other African societies were undermined during the period of Western imperialist incursions into the continent, fidelity to that history itself should never be at issue. Rather, since Armah is a novelist (and not a historian), of greater significance should be the quality of his imaginative use of the past for the purpose of furthering present sociopolitical objectives. If, as he has stated, “the human value of literature, after all, lies primarily in the interactions it makes possible between the way we live and the way we think-between our existence and the reflections we make of and on that existence,” it would not be inapposite to demand of the critics that they use “a high level of knowledge about technique, a craft, an art” (Armah 1985,356) to bring out the writer's total vision, his textual strategies, through aesthetic evaluations.