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AYI KWEI ARMAH AND FRENCH EXISTENTIALISM: A COMPARISON (GHANA)
Abstract
Existentialism is a philosophy which flourishes in extreme situations. Identified with the period of the French Resistance when Frenchmen were held as political prisoners by the Germans, existentialism, with its call for an uncompromised allegiance to a leftist system of values, served to boost the sagging morale of French political prisoners who had witnessed during the Occupation the subversion of their nation's democratic principles by German totalitarianism. The writer finds in postindependence Ghana another example of an extreme situation which, subsequently, has given rise to the existentialist patterns in the novels by the Ghanaian author Ayi Kwei Armah. Largely, Ayi Kwei Armah depicts in his novels the subversion of traditional values by the wide-spread adoption of the corrupt moneyed values imported from the West. The political upheaval on the one hand, which has been nothing short of a national catastrophe, thus has created on the other a moral and spiritual crisis. The identification of a crisis situation in postindependence Ghana, comparable to that created by the German occupation of France during World War II, serves largely as the basis for the examination of the recurrent existentialist patterns in the literature by Ayi Kwei Armah. Using Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre as representatives of French existentialist thought, the writer links, systematically, the novels of Ayi Kwei Armah to the selected works of French existentialists Camus and Sartre on the bases of the following: their collective perception of man's existence in the world as gratuitous, alien and absurd and their subsequent advocacy of choice, freedom and responsibility to counteract the ennui which comes from man's recognition of his superfluousness (Chapters Two-Five). Chapter Six examines Armah's recent novel The Healers in light of the existentialist perspective and concludes that it is Armah's and, by implication, Camus's and Sartre's defense of the human psyche from destructive external influences which imbues their works with their overriding tone of optimism, thus exonerating the authors from wide-spread charges of nihilism.
Subject Area
African literature|Comparative literature|Romance literature
Recommended Citation
JACKSON, TOMMIE LEE, "AYI KWEI ARMAH AND FRENCH EXISTENTIALISM: A COMPARISON (GHANA)" (1985). ETD collection for University of Nebraska-Lincoln. AAI8526594.
https://digitalcommons.unl.edu/dissertations/AAI8526594