Armah, Ayi Kwei (Vol. 136) - Taban lo Liyong （essay date 1991）
Taban lo Liyong （essay date 1991）
SOURCE: “Ayi Kwei Armah in Two Moods,” in Journal of Commonwealth Literature, Vol. XXVI, No. 1, 1991, pp. 1-18.
[In the following essay, Liyong takes exception with Armah's politics and what he terms Armah's “fascination with revolutions, revolutionaries, overturners, [and] coup-makers. …”]
Since Ayi Kwei Armah is fond of scaring readers off by opening with philosophical premises, I would also like to kick off by offering a philosophical truism of my own.
Works of art are ideologically based. Especially the serious ones wrought by a society's leading thinkers and artists. Even when they look so innocent as children's stories, popular proverbs, or pop-songs, they still elaborate, and popularise a people's philosophy of life.
So, explicitly some of the time, and implicitly most of the time a society's artists reinforce the group's outlook towards itself and towards other peoples....
[The entire page is 8021 words long]
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