Memory, verbal onslaught and persuasive eloquence in Armah’s Two Thousand Seasons and The Healers

Abstract

Language dissects thought. In language fortified with calculated verbal vituperation and persuasive eloquence, Ayi Kwei Armah takes his audience down memory lane—a retrospect (in the characteristic manner of the Sankofa model) into the original identity of the African. Sankofa dwells on the idyllic past which serves as a model for a restructured future. One hears the evocative voice of Anoa’s prophecy of two thousand seasons, wandering along other ways and finding paths of living way. The way is glaringly replete with verbal bullets with which Armah dwells on the Blackman’s indulgence. This gives rise to the flagrant losing of “the way” to the “predators” and “destroyers” in Two Thousand Seasons. In his advocacy for a restoration to the forgotten way, Armah’s verbal onslaught provokes sharp awakening that propels the people to a positive action to recover the lost way into “understanding the mind beyond despair to healing work”. In The Healers therefore, Armah’s in-depth philosophies led by the master healer, Damfo and the trainee healer, Densu provide keys to the restoration of black people and racial renewal. The focus of this study is Armah’s eloquent intellectual expressions: evocative poetic lamentation, prophecy, symbolism, and studded imagery of brutality, servitude and restoration. The work concludes by demonstrating Armah’s achievements with the deployment of linguistic weapons. Has he succeeded in making his reader / audience see clearly the Blackman’s annals of misdemeanor and the consequences? How realistic is his redemptive posture into Ebibirman; the liberated community of black people? This is the crux of this paper intertwined with Sankofa.