5 Early reviewers were quite impressed, sometimes negatively. The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born was Armah's first novel, probably written while the author was participating in the Graduate Writing Program of Columbia University, and was first published in the U.S.A. Before coming to live there, he had been working in Paris on the staff of Jeune Afrique, as well as returning to the U.S.A. Armah wrote and published Two Thousand Seasons in Dar es Salaam, Tanzania. It concerns the struggle towards the dream of a future society a struggle which will he spearheaded by a pure militant elite, who will have finally overcome and thrown off the legacies of the Arab and European enslavers and colonisers. 4 Narrated in the first person, but by no determinate individual, it is a saga ranging across several hundred years of African history. 3 His most recent book, Two Thousand Seasons, is quite unlike any other of his works. This experience, and his understanding of the American character may have assisted in the writing of why Are We So Blest?, a novel with an interesting three-strand narrative situation about two Africans, and an American girl caught up in a revolutionary situation in Africa. 2 Before this 1966 return, Armah had worked in Algiers as a translator for the weekly Revolution Africaine. 1 Having thus become a 'been-to', Armah was able to delineate in his second novel, Fragments, the climate of expectation created by the return of an expatriate West African, and the disappointment which follows if he fails to satisfy the desires of his hopeful relatives and friends.
in sociology, graduating from Harvard with Honours. Born in Takoradi, Ghana in 1939, he left twenty years later for Massachusetts, where he studied for a B.A. It has become a recurrent pattern among leading African writers and intellectuals to complete their education in the U.S.A., and Ayi Kwei Armah is no exception to this trend.
Lecture on: Ayi Kwei Armah, The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born (1968) for H235 African Literature, Murdoch University, 1976-7 Garry Gillard Garry Gillard > writing > lectures > The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born
0 kommentar(er)
