SOURCE: “The Middle Passage in African Literature: Wole Soyinka, Yambo Ouologuem, Ayi Kwei Armah,” in African Literature Today: 11 Myth & History, Africana Publishing Company, 1980, pp. 62-84.

[In the following essay, Johnson examines the use of the Middle Passage (a term describing the grueling voyage between West Africa and the Caribbean that slaves were forced to endure), literally and figuratively, as the focus of novels by Wole Soyinka, Ayi Kwei Armah, and Ouologuem.]

INTRODUCTION

The Middle Passage in literature is, at bottom, a metaphor for displacement and exile. Predictably, the historical trauma of the slave trade generates the metaphor's dramatic and often decisive points of departure or reference:

To my mind it all started with the scarlet handkerchiefs … It was the scarlet did for the Africans. … When the kings saw that the whites—I think the Portuguese were the first—were taking out these scarlet handkerchiefs as if they were waving, they told the blacks, ‘Go on then and get scarlet handkerchief.’ … And they were captured.

(Esteban Montejo, Autobiography of a Runaway Slave)

Aye, lad, I have seen these factories …
Have seen the nigger kings whose vanity
and greed turned wild black hides of Fellatah,
Mandingo, Ibo, Kru to gold for us.
And there was one—King Anthracite we named him—…
He'd honour us with drum and feast and conjo
and palm-oil-glistening wenches deft in love,
and for tin crowns that shone with paste,
red calico and German-silver trinkets …

(Robert Hayden, ‘Middle Passage’)

In effect, whether it be in the elegantly studied ironies and memory of Hayden's poetry or in the casual precisions of the Cuban Esteban Montejo's recall, the Middle Passage has remained an enduring, even necessary, motif in the literature of the black diaspora. Until the politics of post-independence provoked contemporary African authors to outrage and to a near-fatalistic vision of history, the motif had been virtually absent from modern African literature. As may therefore be imagined, its use in the literature has been graphic and accusatory whenever the texts set out to examine the various implications of that context and those principles to which the selections from Hayden and Montejo introduce us. Of course, this intensity is not really surprising, given the literary, and satirical, perception of ancient and modern ‘ships of state’ in writers such as Wole Soyinka (A Dance of the Forests, 1960), Yambo Ouologuem (Bound to Violence, 1968), and Ayi Kwei Armah (Two Thousand Seasons). This 1973 novel of Armah's is treated here as a climactic dramatization of our theme as developed with slow intensity through his The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born (1968), Fragments (1969) and Why Are We So Blest? (1972). The exacerbated and pointed reminiscence which marks the treatment of the Middle Passage motif in literature is, incidentally, present in other genres. Thus, for example, it is worth noting that the Goree flashback in Mahama Troare's film Reou-Takh (1971) is graphic and accusatory. The branding-of-the-slaves scene in Ousmane Sembène's latest film, Ceddo (1978), linked as it is to religious and political exploitation, is one of the film's most intensely rendered sequences.

Two Thousand Seasons provides us, accordingly, with a most comprehensive vision of the catastrophic reaches of slavery. We are as a consequence invited to contemplate a multi-form Middle Passage by the oracular okyeame voice with which Anoa opens the novel (pp. 26–7):

Slavery—do you know what it is? Ah, you will know it. Two thousand seasons, a thousand going into it, a second thousand crawling maimed from it, will teach you everything about enslavement, the destruction of souls, the killing of bodies, the infusion of violence into every breath, every drop, every morsel of your sustaining air, your water, your food. Till you come again upon the way.

The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born is rather more concentratedly bitter and plain-speaking. The novel representatively establishes a vision which eschews irony, casualness and the oracular when it parallels the thrust of the selections from Hayden and Montejo. The contemporary political and moral understanding of the issues involved is as a result unequivocally presented in the novel's unhappy sense of historical symmetry (pp. 130, 148):

And yet these were the socialists of Africa, fat, perfumed, soft with the ancestral softness of chiefs who have sold their people and are celestially happy with the fruits of the trade.

He could have asked if anything was supposed to have changed after all, from the days of chiefs selling their people for the trinkets of Europe.

We shall return to Armah in a later development of premise and theme.

THE SHIPS OF STATE

When a trader wants slaves, he applies to a chief for them, and tempts him with his wares … Accordingly, he falls on his neighbours and a desperate battle ensues. If he prevails and takes prisoners, he gratifies his avarice by selling them.

The above rendition of our Middle Passage context and principals is from The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African (1789). The nature of its focus here serves as a fine prelude to Wole Soyinka's treatment of the Middle Passage as ancient and modern political tragedy. In this Soyinka, of course, parallels Armah. Armah's formulation runs true to form, however: it is brutal in its enraged clarity. Soyinka's also runs true to his own rather distinctive style: though deadly, it seems flamboyantly posed. ‘As a writer I have a special responsibility because I can smell the reactionary sperm years before the rape of the nation takes place’ (1972, p. 8). The statement of the case does seem rather melodramatic; yet it is most useful, indispensable even, given the several categories in this analysis of the Middle Passage. The focus on conception, for example, anticipates the development later in this essay of two corollary Middle Passage themes: an abiku or ogbanje motif and the rites of passage implications of that motif. It is, however, the political thrust of Soyinka's concern which is of immediate consequence here.

The politics of the Middle Passage is, of necessity, a politics of villainy. This perception is further reinforced by a literature of contemporary and retrospective disenchantment. Political traumas associated with colonial seduction and autocratic self-indulgence result in a series of character portrayals which emphasize sycophancy and avarice. This is virtually always the case; it is only further intensified by Armah's focus on excremental pathology and by Soyinka's megalomaniac, and cannibal, powers-that-be. Soyinka, however, never quite attains Armah's hard-eyed rage. In this respect, though at diminished intensities, he is more in tune with the orgiastic black humour with which Ouologuem launches his past and present ships of state. Thus, Soyinka's deadliness, early and late, echoes the comic melodrama of autocratic self-indulgence and sado-masochism which distinguishes the ‘armpit’ scene in The Lion and the Jewel (1963). Therefrom comes a portrait of the ruler and, by extension, a comment on the ‘stubborn continuity’ of a certain political genealogy (CP 2, p. 25):

(Baroka in bed, naked except for baggy trousers, calf-length. It is a rich bedroom covered in animal skins and rugs. Weapons round the wall. Also a strange machine, a most peculiar contraption with a long lever. Kneeling beside the bed is Baroka's current Favourite, engaged in plucking the hairs from his armpit. She does this by first massaging the spot around the selected hair very gently with her forefinger. Then, with hardly a break, she pulls out the hair between her finger and thumb with a sudden sharp movement. Baroka twitches slightly with each pull. Then an aspirated ‘A-ah', and a look of complete beatitude spreads all over his face.)

The portrait is of one of powers-that-be who ‘love to have [their] hairs ruffled well below the navel', as Soyinka puts it four years later in Kongi's Harvest (CP 2, p. 64). In the early Soyinka of The Lion and the Jewel, the fate which yokes victims (‘outpullers of sweat-bathed hairs’) to predator is benignly contained. When the play ends, the abuse of power and complicity in such abuse are all tempered and diffused in a comically ambiguous fertility dance. The later Kongi's Harvest is, of course, unwilling to surrender to such optimism. There, the climactic dance is pathological and is choreographed into a near-literal representation of the cannibalistic implications of political rapacity (CP 2, pp. 131–2).

We are thus introduced to what Two Thousand Seasons calls ‘a race of takers seeking offerers, predators seeking prey. It is a race that takes, imposes itself, and its victims make offerings to it’ (p. 26). The Middle Passage motif is unavoidably linked to, indeed depends on, such a race of ‘caretakers’ (Armah). Thus, the intervening and benign comedy of The Lion and the Jewel notwithstanding, Wole Soyinka had even earlier than 1963 set out to temper exuberance over the political enterprise in the metaphors of the Middle Passage. We see this response in that historical, ironical jab of a parable, A Dance of the Forests (1960), which Soyinka wrote in response to a commission to write a drama to be ‘performed as part of the Nigerian Independence Celebrations, October, 1960’. In the play, a flashback from a corrupt and blindly naïve present takes us centuries back to the Court of Mata Kharibu (CP 1, pp. 46–57). It is a step back the purpose of which Armah's The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born makes clear in the succinctness of ‘New people, same style, old dance’ (p. 156), and in the resigned clarity of ‘Endless days, same days, stretching into the future with no end anywhere in sight’ (p. 160).

Into Mata Kharibu's ‘courtly’ drama of political excess and sexual appetite Soyinka introduces the Slave Dealer; with bitter and profound irony, he is offered as a final solution. I have elsewhere, in ‘History and dystopia in Alejo Carpentier and Wole Soyinka’ (1977a, p. 12), offered the following view of the Slave Dealer and of his historical and moral significance:

The weight of the intractable in Man and History finally results in weariness … In A Dance of the Forests that intractability in Man and Time is incarnate in the Slave Dealer, scavenger of the roads to Dystopia. He is the perversion which is born when men acquire power over one another, and their instincts are fulfilled.

His ship, by extension the ship of state, is the ‘slight coffin into which he stuffs his victims’. Doppelganger to the political ruler, the Slave Dealer is conceived of as an extension of the Emperor's excesses. The connection is underscored when Soyinka makes the Emperor vent his anger against the Warrior with ‘Sell that man down the river. He and his men. Sell them all down the river’. For his part, the Slave Dealer insists, perhaps heavy-handedly, on the permanent and transcendent sea-worthiness of his slave ship: ‘My new vessel is capable of transporting the whole of Mata Kharibu's court to hell.’ Soyinka's political suspicions are all the more emphasized when the play's blustering and opportunistic Historian, grandiose in his ingenuousness, tells us that ‘Mata Kharibu and all his ancestors would be proud to ride in such a boat’. The historical vision is an unhappy one; and the play anticipates Soyinka's later expression of concern with ‘reactionary sperm’ and ‘the rape of the nation’.

There is, it now becomes clear, a fateful pointedness to Soyinka's introduction of the Warrior's wife: (A woman, dishevelled, rushes in, followed by a guard … The woman is pregnant. She is the Dead Woman.) History, in sum, is marked and is determined by the ‘stubborn continuity’ of aborted or mutant expectations. Conception takes place in, and birth comes from, ‘branded womb to branded womb’. A Dance of the Forests's Dead Woman/Pregnant Woman is therefore thematically and dramatically significant, serving here as a logical introduction to the abiku/ogbanje vision of the rites of passage which will be developed later in this essay. Fittingly, her prostrated condition closes the Mata Kharibu flashback, opening the play to the chaotic present. Thus, at the enslavement order from Mata Kharibu, ‘Guard. You know my sentence. See that you carry it out.’ (The Woman clasps her womb, gasps and collapses. Sudden blackout, Immediate light to reveal Aroni and Forest Head, who continue to stare into the spectacle.) And so, the birth of a nation.

A Dance of the Forests's ‘Sell that man down the river … Sell them all down the river’ is also of some significance for other historical and literary reasons. Soyinka's flashback is an allegorical and sensitive compass whose ‘true North’ will be dramatized in the brutal Middle Passage of Ouologuem's Bound to Violence. To the south and down the river, a brutal slave revolt on a slave ship climaxes Armah's Two Thousand Seasons, as we shall see later. Historically, the compass also points out motifs slave dealer, slave ship and passage, toward the diaspora consciousness with which this essay begins. Thus, centuries later and farther down the coast from Mata Kharibu's court, Captain Canot's Adventures of an African Slaver (1854) strains incongruously after poetic aptness as it provides a passage into Armah's fiction and Hayden's poetry. Canot's ship, with the ‘bright, ironical name’ (Hayden) of Esperanza, is becalmed in West African waters. There follows a scene pregnant with that ‘living nightmare’ which the literature of the Middle Passage seeks to exorcise—be the exorcism political, historical or, as with the abiku motif, metaphysical (p. 207):

There we hung—
                                                            A painted ship upon a painted ocean!

I cannot describe the fretful anxiety which vexes a mind under such circumstances. Slaves below; a blazing sun above; the boiling sea beneath; a withering air around; decks piled with materials of death; escape unlikely; a phantom in chase behind; the ocean like an unreachable eternity before; uncertainty everywhere; and, within your skull, a feverish mind, harassed by doubt and responsibility, yet almost craving for any act of desperation that will remove the spell. It is a living nightmare, from which the soul pants to be free.¹

Robert Hayden, for his part, resorts to a dark lyricism to capture the sense of history which the various contradictions of the Middle Passage engender:

Shuttles in the rocking loom of history
the dark ships move, the dark ships move
their bright ironical names
like jests of kindness on a murderer's mouth.

In Ouologuem, the contradictions are bound to violence in a less subtle expression.

OUOLOGUEM'S ‘GRINNING, TUTELARY GODS’

So among us the ostentatious cripples turned the honoured position of caretakers into plumage for their infirm selves.

Two Thousand Seasons (p. 99)

Like Armah and Soyinka, Ouologuem is unrelenting when he traces the political woof and warp in the ‘rocking loom’ of the Middle Passage. Rather fittingly, one of the praise-names which Bound to Violence confers on Madoubo, son of the ‘dreaded and magnificent Said ben Isaac Al-Heit', African emperor, is ‘a man so strong that with a single stroke of his sword he could split a slave in two or sever the head of a bull’ (p. 45). Given the literary ancestry of Bound to Violence, it is not at all surprising that ‘bright, ironical names’ are inseparable from the orgiastic flamboyance with which Ouologuem explores and interprets our motifs.

Heretically exuberant with both Koranic exultations and western thought, Ouologuem's novel, as he more calmly explains it in an interview with the Guardian, is an attempt ‘to “restore an historical dimension” to the Negro problem. His thesis is that three historical periods of colonialism have been responsible for the Negro “slave” mentality. First, domination by African notables (like his own family); then the Arab conquest; and, since the mid-nineteenth century, British and French colonization. “After all, the white slave trader only proposed—it was the African notables who disposed.”’²

The novel itself resists calm statement, however. It is in the rhetoric of a highly crafted and often grotesque iconoclasm that Bound to Violence presents its thesis: ‘the rush for that precious raw material, the nigger-trash … At that early date! So be it! Thy work be sanctified, O Lord. And exalted’ (p. 24). There is the same focus on the ‘rush’ and that ‘early date’ in Armah's Two Thousand Seasons. As may be expected, Armah's outrage is, by contrast, declaratively and fiercely unequivocating: ‘We are not so warped in soul, we are not Arabs, we are not Muslims to fabricate a desert god chanting in the wilderness, and call our creature creator. That is not our way’ (p. 5). Both writers none the less confront the Middle Passage significance of the alien's ‘way’. ‘Reactionary sperm’ and ‘the rape of the nation’ are elaborately detailed in the suggestive but succinct identity of ‘Hussein, twin brother of Hassan the Syphilitic’ (Two Thousand Seasons, p. 34) as well as in Ouologuem's series of dynastic agonies and ecstasies (p. 16):

On April 20, 1532, on a night soft as a cloak of moist satin, Saif al-Haram, performing his conjugal ‘duty’ with his four stepmothers seriatim and all together, had the imprudent weakness to overindulge and in the very midst of his dutiful delights gave up the ghost … The next day his raven-eyed minister Al Hadj Abd al-Hassana, having established a stripling boy and Hawa, the most beautiful of Saif's stepmothers, in his bed, was stung by an asp which he was caressing in the belief that he was holding something else, opened his mouth wide three times, and died … His successor was his cousin Holongo, ‘a horrible biped with the brutal expression of a buffalo', humped in front and in back; after a reign of two years, moaning in enviable torment, he died in the arms of the courtesan Aiosha, who strangled him as he was crying out in ecstasy. His successor was Saif Ali, a pederast with pious airs, as vicious as a red donkey, who succumbed six months later to the sin of gluttony, leaving the crown to Saif Jibril, Ali's a younger brother, who, slain by the sin of indiscretion, was replaced by Saif Yussufi, one of the sons of Ramina … An albino notorious for his ugliness, he was twice felled by one of his wife's admirers; the third time—at last!—much to his amazement he was carried off by an ill wind, ceding his place to Saif Medioni of Mostaganem, who was recalled to God ten days later, torn to pieces, so it is said, by the contrary angels of Mercy and Justice. Then the last children of the accursed Saif and of his stepmothers reigned successively: Saif Ezekiel, who was dethroned after four years; Saif Ismail, reduced to impotence for seven months, then forced to abdicate; and the third, Saif Benghighi of Saida, somnolent for five years: as though the Court were condemned to have no tongue but a forked one.

This identification of ‘ostentatious cripples’ with the ‘ship of state’ parallels Soyinka's vision, of course. The difference lies, however, in the matter of flamboyance and intensity. For example, the Kadiye is ‘crippled’ with considerably more restraint in Soyinka's The Swamp Dwellers (CP 1, pp. 93–4):

(The drummer is now at the door, and footsteps come up the gangway. The drummer is the first to enter, bows in backwards, drumming praises of the Kadiye. Next comes the Kadiye himself, a big, voluminous creature of about fifty, smooth-faced except for little tufts of beard around his chin. His head is shaved clean. He wears a kind of loin cloth, white, which hangs over his left arm. He is bare above the waist. At least half of the Kadiye's fingers are ringed. He is followed by a servant, who brushes the flies off him with a horse-tail flick.)

The Kadiye is, however, easy enough to detect in any one of the characters with which Bound to Violence explores rapacity. We see this in the deformed and deadly sensuality of Saif (p. 58):

There was dignity and strength in Saif's long, slow strides. Smiling, he caressed the cutlass under his dashiki and, soothed by the light breeze from the plains, sponged his square forehead beneath his graying short-cropped hair—the forehead of a warrior far more than of a religious leader. A few steps from the threshold, he removed his head covering with a somewhat theatrical gesture, revealing an aristocratic, dissolute, and handsome face and the bald crown of his head—a sign of weariness or of early debauchery. His thick lips, his aquiline nose, indeed his every feature smacked unmistakably of vice.

The violence that results in Armah and Ouologuem is correspondingly greater and more explicit in thrust and form. As a corollary development, the Middle Passage is spatially and temporally more extensive in Ouologuem: ‘more and more often, unfreed slaves and subjugated tribes were herded off to Mecca, Egypt, Ethiopia, the Red Sea, and America at prices as ridiculous as the flea-bitten dignity of the niggertrash’ (p. 18).

The Middle Passage is directly represented as a metaphor for dispossession, displacement and exile. Ouologuem and Armah soon enough come to focus on grotesque marches which transform the continent into endless ‘Trails of Tears’ and sadism. They all lead, ineluctably, to final solutions in ‘factories’ and ships. The most important and celebrated of these factories, ‘castles', still stand along the ‘gold coast’ of Ghana. This fact gives to Armah's political vision an especial immediacy when, as a Ghanaian novelist, he insists that ‘the beautyful ones are not yet born', the new dispensation notwithstanding (p. 91):

After a youth spent fighting the white man, why should not the president discover as he grows older that his real desire has been to be like the white governor himself, to live above all blackness in the big old slave castle.

To get to factory, castle and ship Ouologuem transforms his landscape into trail upon trail which are made to cross and parallel each other in bewildering yet indeflexible symmetries. Throughout, the various incarnations of Mata Kharibu repeat his ‘sentence’ because, like him, they are bound to violence and violation (p. 27):

When they get to Gagol Gosso, which has surrendered, they ask for food and huts for their slaves; the Chief's answer: ‘Sell them.’ They sold them. Those whom nobody wanted were drowned to save ammunition. And the march continued, a nightmare.

‘Time passes; once more tornadoes send down sheets of water, roads and trails are drowned in mud’ (loc, cit.). But, as in Two Thousand Seasons where the marches threaten to make of time ‘same days stretching into the future with no end in sight', Bound to Violence picks up the trail and its victims. A compulsive right of passage is insisted upon in spite of wind, water and mud: ‘And yet, at infrequent intervals, a caravan traversed those dismal and endless plains: slave traders driving wretched files of men, women, and children, covered with open sores, choked in iron collars, their wrists shackled and bleeding’ (p. 28). The novel's vision is unflinching; its point of view is obsessively detailed. Our motifs are therefore sharply etched out with naturalistic insistence in Ouologuem—as compared to the allegorical orientation of Soyinka's A Dance of the Forests. Soyinka's ‘reactionary sperm’ and Pregnant Woman/Dead Woman are suggestive of things that Ouologuem is more than ready to render explicitly (p. 27):

The children, the sick and disabled are killed with rifle butts and bayonets, their corpses abandoned by the roadside. A woman is found squatting. Big with child. They push her, prod her with their knees. She gives birth standing up, marching. The umbilical cord is cut, the child kicked off the road, and the column marches on, heedless of the delirious whimpering mother, who, limping and staggering, finally falls a hundred yards farther on and is crushed by the crowd.

Before the climactic expression which comes in Two Thousand Seasons, Armah's Fragments gives a form to these recurrent metaphors of birth and death which makes it easier to elucidate the rites of passage metaphysics in the literature of the Middle Passage. Wole Soyinka's triad, sperm, birth and death, thus comes to full term through an elaboration of the abiku motif.

‘THE BEAUTYFUL ONES ARE NOT YET BORN’

As she buried one child after another her sorrow gave way to despair and then to grim resignation. The birth of her children, which should be a woman's crowning glory, became for Ekwefi mere physical agony devoid of promise. The naming ceremony … became an empty ritual … One of them was a pathetic cry, Onwumbiko—‘Death, I implore you’. But Death took no notice … Ozoemena—‘May it not happen again’. She died … Onwuma—‘Death may please himself’. And he did.

Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart (p. 74)

In the silence of webs, Abiku moans, shaping Mounds from the yolk.

Wole Soyinka, ‘Abiku’

The Middle Passage concerns, so obviously aimed at birth and death in the political process and at historical commentary, do more than that. The foreshortened cycle of birth and death involved is also seen as a violation of certain metaphysical and biological rhythms which, precisely because of their cyclical nature, make conception, birth, death and ancestral reintegration the bases of temporal and spiritual order. In the language of Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart (p. 115), ‘The land of the living was not far removed from the domain of the ancestors. There was coming and going between them … A man's life from birth to death was a series of transition rites which brought him nearer and nearer to his ancestors’. The Middle Passage in its resistance to such beginnings and endings is a state of permanent exile, a wandering in limbo. In the metaphysics of Things Fall Apart (p. 74) we are faced with the incarnation of a ‘wicked tormentor’ and an ‘evil cycle of birth and death’. It is also appropriate here to highlight a sequence of references in that vision of disturbance in the cycle of fertility and regeneration which Wande Abimbola derives from the metaphysics of Ifa Divination Poetry (1977, p. 3):

Pregnant women could not deliver their babies:
Barren women remained barren.
Small rivers were covered up with leaves.
Semen dried up in men's testicles
Women no longer saw their menstruation.

J. B. Danquah's The Akan Doctrine of God provides us with a formulation which integrates rites of passage, metaphysics and politics. We can therefore more readily understand the profane thrust of the politics of the Middle Passage when it turns ‘the honoured position of caretakers into plumage for infirm … selves’ (Armah):

Akan knowledge of God (Nyame) teaches He is the Great Ancestor. He is a true high God and manlike ancestor of the first man. As such ancestor He deserves to be worshipped in the visible ancestral head, the good chief of the community … All ancestors are in the line of the Great Ancestor … Life, human life, is one continuous blood, from the originating blood of the Great Source of their blood.

(Johnson, 1971, p. 24; my emphasis)

Armah's Fragments mutes the political thrust of the view to emphasize in the character of Naana the historical and cultural significance of the rites of passage. The very structure of the novel is, as a matter of exegesis, better understood in the light of the perspective which Danquah gives us. That perspective shapes the narrative and thematic rhythms which unite the first chapter and first paragraph with the last chapter and last paragraph. As a corollary feature, the novel's tragic lyricism is more fully appreciated when we understand why and how Naana's condition determines its expression. She awaits her grandson Baako's return from ‘exile’ abroad; her desire is for a return which affirms ‘one continuous blood, originating from the blood of the Great Source’ (Danquah). But the times are not propitious for a traditional ‘Incantation to Cause the Rebirth of a Dead Child’.³ The novel's frame therefore stands as an ironic and defiant affirmation of order and rhythm in the face of the madness which the narrative seeks to contain. In a sense, in so far as Naana at least completes near-normative rites of passage, one madness (disruption of the ‘line of the Great Ancestor’) is, in fact, contained. Thus Naana, as alpha and omega—and alpha (pp. 11, 286):

Each thing that goes away returns and nothing in the end is lost. The great friend throws all things apart and brings them together again. That is the way everything goes and turns around. That is how all living things come back after long absences, and in the whole great world all things are living things. All that goes returns. He will return.

I am here against the last of my veils. Take me. I am ready. You are the end. The beginning. You who have no end. I am coming.

The ‘line of the Great Ancestor’ has, however, been warped, if not actually broken. Under the pressure of political disenchantment Armah insists again and again that the rites of passage—conception and birth especially—have been profaned or violated. In sum, in Soyinka's inelegant expression, the sperm is a ‘reactionary sperm’. Armah is ready to be even more inelegant. He insists, often in angrily explicit metaphors, that birth and anal canals (passages) have fused into a ‘marvellous rottenness’. Consider how the motif is developed in the following sequence from The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born; we move from what seems mere, even if crude, invective to excremental birth. I resort to full documentation for effect (pp. 9, 97, 133):

‘Your mother's rotten cunt!’

The man put out his hands and touched the body in between the thighs, just below the genitals. The flesh yielded too readily, and the dreaded sense of familiarity threatened to return. The hand moved up. The vagina itself was harder, more resisting, almost abrasive in the sharpness of its hair and the dryness of outer skin. Wanting a satisfying moistness of a woman aroused at last, the man pushed his hand farther up and then bent it, searching for the hidden knob of flesh. But the movement had brought his wrist against his wife's belly, and the long line of a scar took the man's mind completely away from any thought of joy.

The last child had had to be dragged out of his mother's womb …

The two men left their women and went off toward the bathroom and the latrine. The cement of the yard was slippery underfoot with a wetness that increased as they got closer to their goal. When they came to the latrine, they found its door locked, and had to wait outside. The agony and the struggle of the man inside were therefore plainly audible to them, long intestinal wrangles leading to protracted anal blasts, punctuated by an all-too-brief interval of pregnant silence. It was a long battle, and the man within took his time … Finally the harsh sound of the old dry newspaper came at the end of a long, tearing, unambiguous sound and the two relaxed in readiness. Then a small boy emerged.

With that distinctive gift for climactic codas which he displays in each one of his novels, Armah moves to a resolution. A coup has taken place; it is, for The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born, merely a ‘change of embezzlers’. Ex-minister Koomson seeks to escape, but the only passage open is through the latrine. With a small shudder Koomson lowers his head till it is just above the hole, then in a rapid sinking action he thrusts it through. But then movement stops, for this is to be a battle from which one emerges only at the end of long tearing. This ‘last child’ (meaning only the latest of a breed) has to be dragged out—to be dragged through (p. 166):

Koomson … went down the hole again, the disgust returning to share his face with his resignation.

This time Koomson's body slipped through easily enough, past the shoulders and down the middle. But at the waist it was blocked by some other obstacle. The man looked at the hole again, but there was space there. Perhaps the latrine man's hole was locked. The wooden latch securing it would be quite small, and should break with a little force.

‘Push!’ the man shouted … Quietly now, he climbed onto the seat, held Koomson's legs and rammed them down. The man pushed some more, and in a moment a rush of foul air coming up told him the Party man's head was out. The body dragged itself down …

It is obvious that the trails and trials of such passages can not lead to that rhythm of integration and cycle which underlies Naana's vision. What we do have is a heretical birth, in effect, a growth whose stubborn metastasis is from ‘branded womb to branded womb', to return to Soyinka's language. This sense of the tragically intractable is an expression of historical consciousness; it is also an invitation to, or a recognition of, the fatalistic. The theme is aptly rendered in the literature which concerns us here through Abiku, a ‘spirit child’ fated to a cycle of early death and rebirth to the same mother. Soyinka's suspicion that the human condition is beyond redemption affects his use of the motif. The voice in ‘Abiku’ shows a defiant insouciance in its stubborn continuity; indeed, it mocks the traditional ritual of mutilation and healing (1966, p. 152):

In vain your bangles cast
Charmed circles at my feet;
I am Abiku, calling for the first
And the repeated time …
So when the snail is burnt in his shell
Whet the heated fragment, brand me
Deeply on the breast. You must know him
When Abiku calls again.
… Mothers! I'll be the
Suppliant snake coiled on the doorstep
Yours the killing cry.

J. P. Clark's ‘Abiku’ is a lyrical plea for release from a Middle Passage (‘doorstep', ‘threshold’) existence, an existence exiled between life and death (1966, p. 117):

No longer then bestride the threshold
But step in and stay
For good. We know the knife-scars
Serrating down your back and front
Like beak of the sword-fish,
And both your ears, notched
As a bondsman to this house,
Are all relics of your first comings.
Then step in, step in and stay
For her body is tired,
Tired, her milk going sour
Where many more mouths gladden the heart.

In Armah's angrier contexts when rite of passage thus becomes the ‘wicked tormentor’ with an ‘evil cycle’ (Achebe), history is measured by the cumulative weight of an ‘unconquerable filth’. It is ‘unconquerable filth’ quickened by an ectoplasmic and therefore lower form of life, ‘made moist and covered over thickly with the juice of every imaginable kind of waste matter’ (The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born, p. 7). Much like Ouologuem's slave-raiding trails which are marked out in wind, water and mud, Armah's ectoplasmic wasteland seems a natural, and permanent, process of birth by excretion (p. 40):

More than halfway now, the world around the central rubbish heap is entered, and smells hit the senses like a strong wall, and even the eyes have something to register. It is so old it has become more than mere rubbish, that is why. It has fused with the earth beneath.

Appropriately, one of the cries of despair which bondage to such a state of affairs provokes is ‘But slavery … How long?’ (p. 85). But the despair is also a cry of defiance which provokes Armah into a series of extraordinary acts of exorcism in Two Thousand Seasons. It is an exorcism of sufficiently effective catharsis to engender his latest novel, The Healers. Two Thousand Seasons' climax thus comes in an act of individual and collective purgation: a slave rebellion in the very bowels of a slave ship. Its ferocity is responsive to, and is a reflection of, both a curse and a tradition of healing which brooks neither compromise nor charlatan expression. The ritual mutilation to break the ogbanje cycle in Achebe's Things Fall Apart can thus be conceptually related to that search for release from stubborn continuity which quickens the consciousness in Two Thousand Seasons:

He brought out a sharp razor from the goatskin bag slung from his left shoulder and began to mutilate the child. Then he took it away to bury in the Evil Forest, holding it by the ankle and dragging it on the ground behind him. After such treatment it would think twice before coming again, unless it was one of the stubborn ones who returned, carrying the stamp of their mutilation—a missing finger or perhaps a dark line where the medicine man's razor had cut them.

(Things Fall Apart, p. 75)

CONCLUSION: ‘PEOPLE OF THE WAY’

The extraordinary coda into which Two Thousand Seasons concentrates the various features of our Middle Passage theme begins with studied inelegance, and does so calmly enough, in Armah's first novel. Thus, in The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born, ‘The man thought he would surely vomit if he did not get out from this foul smell’ (p. 161). The catatonic melancholia which afflicts ‘the man’ is further intensified into outright madness in Fragments’ Baako. That madness, which comes at the end of the novel, is anticipated by the intense response to a mad dog early in the novel:

On this hot Atlantic day there was something inside the dog making him so cold he seemed to be searching for the whole feel of the road's warm tar under him, and he was turning round and round in circles trying to reach and touch every bit of skin he had all in one impossible movement his limbs and bones were not soft enough to give him.

The child's perception provides the link to that search for a purgative which Two Thousand Seasons will soon resolve (p. 33):

the dog belonged to him and was his best friend in the world … that he was suffering and shivering with coldness because perhaps he had swallowed something bad that he couldn't vomit yet.

The protagonists of Why Are We So Blest? are afflicted with the same bitter and choking need for relief. ‘We have swallowed the wish for our destruction,’ Solo writes (p. 159). As he tells us himself, ‘All my apertures ran with fluid, living and dead, escaping a body unwilling to hold them: blood, urine, vomit, tears, diarrhoea, pus’ (p. 114). But this is merely a morbidly suicidal and non-revolutionary consciousness of self.

The stage is thus set for Two Thousand Seasons to incorporate the references above into that symbolic and also pathologically brutal act of revenge and purgation with which Armah seeks relief from exile in the Middle Passage. The catharsis extends beyond the demands of our motif, however, to underscore a significant change in Armah's narrative point of view. The morally paralysed and catatonic protagonists of his three earlier novels are replaced by a collective identity and voice, by the migratory ‘We’ who endure the slave marches and embarkation of Two Thousand Seasons. Rage and suffering do not now implode, reducing and trapping the individual protagonist in an in-growing and self-damaging estrangement. The novel is emphatic about this change in perspective: ‘How infinitely stupefying the prison of the single, unconnected viewpoint, station of the cut-off vision’ (p. 210). The collective voice may thus be seen as a further illustration of what Danquah calls ‘the line', or the ‘one continuous blood, from the originating blood of the Great Source of their blood’. This vision is strategically insisted upon at just that historical juncture where the Middle Passage threatens exile and separation. We are thus introduced to a special ‘poetics’ of narration. In addition, the narrative mode is a thematic illustration of Naana's rites of passage search for ‘the peace and understanding of those ancient words’: ‘There are no humans born alone … A piece of us, go / and come a piece of us / … There are no humans who walk this earth alone’:

A human being alone
is a thing more sad than any lost animal
and nothing destroys the soul
like its aloneness

(Fragments, pp. 15–16)

For these reasons, Two Thousand Seasons, though the most extravagantly violent of Armah's novels, anticipates rather directly the role of Damfo the Healer, with his passionate sense of community, in the new work The Healers, A Historical Novel:

You, Densu, growing up, have been told you belong to the Fantse people, like everyone else at Esuano. No one told you the Fantse people are no people at all but a single fragment of one community that misfortune blew a part. Of that exploded community the Asante are also a part. The Denchira, the Akim, the Wassa, the Sewhi, the Aowin, the Nzema, the Ekuapem—all these are merely scattered pieces of what once came together.

Not only that. The Akan community itself was just a little piece of something whole—a people that knew only this one name we so seldom hear these days: Ebibirman.

(1977, p. 62)

Here, too, the roll call and invocation to union are also explainable in categories derived from Danquah and from Naana's lyricism:

And you, traveller about to go,
Go and return,
Go, come.

(Fragments, p. 18)

Appropriately, it is when the various trails of the Middle Passage finally converge in the Slave Dealer's ‘coffin’ that Two Thousand Seasons most powerfully activates the sense of community. The numbing shock of marches and trails gives way to collective revolt amid, as Hayden's ‘Middle Passage’ puts it, the ‘charnal stench, effluvium of living death’ of the ship's hold:

where the living and the dead, the horribly dying lie interlocked, lie foul with blood and excrement.

One of the weapons whose ‘fluid’ preparation we have traced through all of Armah's other novels is fashioned out of long-gathering nausea and disgust.

‘With worms eating him so near the surface of his skin', the ‘soft-voiced one', one of the slaves, chuckles in the ship's hold: ‘I will not reach their destination, I am dead already’ (p. 109). He soon appears to be dead, and is then about to be dragged up to the deck and thrown overboard by John, ‘zombi', ‘slavedriver', ‘overfaithful dog’ to the white traders. John is, in this respect, a clear enough prototype of those latter-day political and ‘ostentatious cripples’ who turn ‘the honoured position of caretakers into plumage for their infirm selves’. The rejection of this corruption in Two Thousand Seasons is, as I have put it elsewhere in a response to another of Armah's climactic scenes, ‘what must surely be one of the most brutal of literary codas, one in which all the various levels of significance we have thus far developed are pushed to their narrative, aesthetic, and conceptual limits’ (1977b, p. 26).

It begins when the soft-voiced one suddenly, ‘and in a movement too swift for the following eye', comes to life. He braces his legs around the slavedriver's trunk. His left hand, no longer flopping like a dead thing, ‘took the back of the slavedriver's head while the free right hand groped for and soon found his chin’ (pp. 105–6):

Now the soft-voiced one held open the slavedriver's mouth and in one movement of amazing speed swung his own exhausted, emaciated, tortured body upward so that the two heads were on a level, his mouth next to the slavedriver's. The slavedriver gave a shuddering jerk, but the grip of the soft-voiced one was strong. The soft-voiced one brought his mouth exactly together with the slavedriver's and then—incredible obedience to will—we saw him with our own eyes bring up all the bile and dead blood from within his body into his mouth, and this mixture he vomited forcefully into the slavedriver's now captive mouth. The slavedriver … heaved, refusing at first to swallow the deadly vomit from the sick man's mouth. In vain: the sick man's mouth was stuck to the slavedriver's like a nostril to its twin … The deadly vomit was twice rejected by the struggling slavedriver. Three times the dying man refused to let it escape harmless on to the ship's wood below. Three times the dying man held the virulent juices, rejected, in his own mouth and throat. Three times with increasing force he pushed them down the slavedriver's reluctant throat. The third time the slavedriver's resistance was broken and the sick man shared death with him. Choking, the slavedriver fell to the floor with the soft-voiced one still inseparable from him.

The revolt that follows is bloody and brutal. ‘The twin blows had pushed that askari's eyeballs out from within his head. His body lay prone under us, the tongue hanging out a hand's length from its mouth, the eyeballs fallen so far they almost touched the hanging tongue’ (p. 222). The revolt is successful in a way that counterpoints the nature of another man's memories as Hayden's ‘Middle Passage’ will record it later: ‘we were no match for them. / Our men went down / before the murderous Africans’:

It sickens me
to think of what I saw, of how these apes
threw overboard the butchered bodies of
our men, true Christians all, like so much jetsam.
… I tell you that
we are determined to return to Cuba
with our slaves and there see justice done.

But from that port of call also comes Esteban Montejo's memory of a distant metaphysics and of a broken community, underscoring once again our diaspora framework:

The strongest gods are African. I tell you it's certain they could fly … I don't know how they permitted slavery. The truth is … I can't make head or tail of it. To my mind it all started with the scarlet handkerchiefs, the day they crossed the wall. There was an old wall in Africa, right round the coast, made of palm-bark and magic insects which stung like the devil.

(Autobiography of a Runaway Slave, p. 16)

Wole Soyinka, Yambo Ouologuem and Ayi Kwei Armah examine the breach of community which the Middle Passage represents, and they respond in various ways to the implications of that breaching of the wall. They have on the one hand written historical works which are expressions of outrage over political foolishness and exploitation. These works are a dark look at the grotesque dance of joy of crippled ‘caretakers’ over ‘rolls of cloth some red as daytime blood, some a deep blue close to the colours of the most ancient of our cloths, [and] other things impossible to give a name to or describe, except that they all shone fiercely in the sun’ (Two Thousand Seasons, p. 126).⁴ At the same time, this African literature of the Middle Passage is also an artistic and conceptual initiation into ancestral rhythms and into that consciousness of man and his condition which those rhythms engender:

Now too we began to understand descent. We thought of descent of the body, blood line running through mothers, life's creators here. We thought of descents of the spirit, descent of skills passing through experts to novices; descent of the mind, the mental line through teachers, passers on of knowledge about paths, knowledge about the way along which the people in body will be kept together with the people in spirit, the body of our people with our soul …

Then began that initiation beyond initiations of which the fundis had spoken.

(Two Thousand Seasons, p. 138)

In essence, as Armah in his role of fundi puts it, the literature is engaged in a search for an end to ‘absence of connectedness’. This is why, although prostrate in the coffin of the ship's hold, the voices of Two Thousand Seasons merge in antiphonal epiphany to underscore the dual vision which comes in the Middle Passage (p. 199):

‘What will they do to us if we die so?’
‘They will throw us into the sea.’
‘Ancestors, this death is so new. We cannot join you. We cannot even be wandering ghosts.’
‘No. This is a complete destruction, death with no returning.’

The literature of the Middle Passage is passionately lyrical in its concern and ferocious in its rage. In this way, its purpose and effect are suggestive of the myth in Esteban Montejo's ‘There was an old wall in Africa, right round the coast, made of palm-bark and magic insects which stung like the devil’. Accordingly, ‘descent’ into these narratives of ships, coffins and branded wombs also supply us with a vision of an ‘angle of ascent’ (Hayden). In their treatment of history and politics, Soyinka, Ouologuem and Armah thus demonstrate their interpretation of that ‘special responsibility’ which conditions the modern African writer's attitude to his art.

Notes

1. As in Canot, the following ‘calm’ precedes Armah's uprising:

   … the white destroyers were waiting for a wind.

   It came fitfully when it came at all, the wind. Where we were trapped the strongest wind could only reach us as the languid motion of our own used air, but even that was a merciful thing compared to the total stillness of these days.

   (Two Thousand Seasons, p. 197)

2. This excerpt from the Guardian is featured on the back cover of the Heinemann edition of Bound to Violence.

3. ‘Incantation to Cause the Rebirth of a Dead Child', Poems of Black Africa, ed. Wole Soyinka, New York, Hill & Wang, 1975, pp. 162, 163.

   You my child
   Oludande, you born-to-die,
   Return from the red soil of heaven,
   Come and eat the black soil of this world.

4. The common reference to red cloth by Armah and Esteban Montejo does make for an interesting reading of ‘Oyeku Meji red cloth is never used to cover the dead’ from Abimbola's Ifa Divination Poetry (pp. 49–50):

   A small walking stick goes in front of he who wades through a foot-path on a wet day.
   The two soles of the feet,
   Struggle persistently for possession of the narrow path.
   Ifa divination was performed for one hundred and sixty four cloths
   When they were coming from heaven to earth.
   All of them were told to perform sacrifice.
   But only Red Cloth performed sacrifice.
   After performing sacrifice,
   He started to have honour and respect.
   After a man has used Red Cloth for a long time,
   On the day the man dies,
   Red Cloth is removed from his corpse.
   Only white and other shades of cloth go with the dead to heaven.
   Red Cloth must never go with him.
   Only Red Cloth performed sacrifice.
   Only Red Cloth offered sacrifice to the divinities
   Red Cloth does not go to heaven with the dead.
   After deceiving the dead for a while (on earth),
   It turns away from him (on the road to heaven).

   Abimbola suggests something of the sacral danger involved: ‘The Yoruba do not use red cloth to cover up the dead. To them, red signifies danger and restlessness. Since what the dead need is peace, it is not surprising that the Yoruba will not cover the dead with a cloth that has any red colour whatsoever’ (op. cit., p. 156). Rite of passage and red cloth are linked thereby.

References

Abimbola, Wande (1977) Ifa Divination Poetry, New York, Nok Publishers.

Achebe, Chinua (1959) Things Fall Apart, London, Heinemann.

Armah, Ayi, Kwei (1971a) The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born, New York, Collier, London, Heinemann.

Armah, Ayi Kwei (1971b) Fragments, New York, Collier. London, Heinemann, 1974.

Armah, Ayi Kwei (1973a) Why Are We So Blest?, New York, Anchor/Doubleday. London, Heinemann.

Armah, Ayi Kwei (1973b) Two Thousand Seasons, Nairobi, East African Publishing House. London, Heinemann.

Armah, Ayi Kwei (1977) Excerpt from The Healers: A Historical Novel in First World: An International Journal of Black Thought, Premier Issue, January/February, 1977.

Canot, Captain Theodore (1854, 1969) Adventures of an African Slaver, New York, Dover Publications.

Clark, J. P. (1966) ‘Abiku', in Modern Poetry from Africa, ed. Gerald Moore and Ulli Beier, Baltimore, Maryland, Penguin.

Equiano, Olaudah (1789, 1972) Narrative, in Black Writers of America, ed. Richard Barksdale and Kenneth Kinnamon, New York, Macmillan.

Hayden, Robert (1975) Angle of Ascent: New and Selected Poems, New York, Liveright.

Johnson, Lemuel (1971) The Devil, the Gargoyle and the Buffoon: The Negro as Metaphor in Western Literature, New York, Kennikat.

Johnson, Lemuel (1977a) ‘History and dystopia in Alejo Carpentier and Wole Soyinka', Afro-Hispanic Symposium paper, in Studies in Afro-Hispanic Literature, ed. Clementine Rabessa and Gladys Seda-Rodriquez, New York, Medgar Evers College.

Johnson, Lemuel (1977b) ‘Anti-politics and its representation in the Cuban and African political novel: Edmundo Desnoes and Ayi Kwei Armah,’ ASA/LASA paper; in press: History of African Literature in European Languages, Vol. IV: Comparative, ed. Albert Gerard, Liège, Brussels.

Montejo, Esteban (1973) The Autobiography of a Runaway Slave (Biografía de un Cimarron trans. Jocasta Innes, ed. Miguel Barnet), New York, Vintage.

Ouologuem, Yambo (1971) Bound to Violence (trans. Ralph Manheim), London, Heinemann.

Soyinka, Wole (1964) ‘Abiku', in Modern Poetry from Africa, ed. Gerald Moore and Ulli Beier, Baltimore, Maryland, Penguin.

Soyinka, Wole (1967) A Dance of the Forests, London, Oxford University Press.

Soyinka, Wole (1967) Kongi's Harvest, London, Oxford University Press.

Soyinka, Wole (1971) The Lion and the Jewel, London, Oxford University Press.

Soyinka, Wole (1972) In ‘Man Alive', John Goldblatt, the Guardian, 27 November.

Soyinka, Wole (1973) Collected Plays 1, London, Oxford University Press.

Soyinka, Wole (1974) Collected Plays 2, London, Oxford University Press.

Soyinka, Wole (1975) (ed.) Poems of Black Africa, New York, Hill & Wang. London, Heinemann.