Criticism > Contemporary Literary Criticism > Armah, Ayi Kwei (Vol. 136) - Chinyere Nwahunanya （essay date 1995）

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Chinyere Nwahunanya （essay date 1995）

SOURCE: “The Writer as Physician: The Therapeutic Vision in Ayi Kwei Armah's The Healers,” in Neohelicon, Vol. XXII, No. 2, 1995, pp. 141-54.

[In the following essay, Nwahunanya terms Armah's The Healers, “a fictional discourse on the nature and control of political power.”]

In my conclusion to a recent essay on Two Thousand Seasons, I posited that Ayi Kwei Armah “situates the African tragedy within the context of the loss of ‘the way’ as a guiding ethos and suggests a return to this moral anchor and revitalising essence as a sine qua non in the process of charting a new course for the ideal Africa of the future”. I suggested also that in The Healers, Armah extends the frontiers of his proposition in his suggestion that the work for the future, the assignment for the healers, is the cultivation of the awareness that can ensure a complete return to...

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1. Introduction
2. Principal Works
3. Criticism
   1. S. Nyamfukudza （review date 7 March 1980）
   2. Kofi Owusu （essay date Spring 1988）
   3. Ahmed Saber （essay date 1989）
   4. Taban lo Liyong （essay date 1991）
   5. Derek Wright （essay date 1991）
   6. Edward Sackey （essay date Autumn 1991）
   7. Adewale Maja-Pearce （essay date 1993）
   8. Ode S. Ogede （essay date April 1993）
   9. B. M. Ibitokun （essay date Spring/Fall 1993）
   10. Leif Lorentzon （essay date 1994）
   11. K. Damodar Rao （essay date July 1994）
   12. Chinyere Nwahunanya （essay date 1995）
   13. Paul R. Petrie （essay date Summer 1997）
   14. Samuel A. Dseagu （essay date 1998）
4. Further Reading
5. Copyright

1. African Literature