Ayi Kwei Armah's - Fragments (1970)
Background of the Author
Ayi Kwei Armah (born 28 October 1939) is a Ghanaian writer. Best known for his novels, including The Beautiful Ones Are Not Yet Born (1968), Fragments (1970),Two Thousand Seasons (1973) and The Healers (1979), he is also an essayist, as well as having written poetry, short stories, and books for children.
Analysis and Summary
Fragments is a vehicle of self-discovery striving to define African identity and enable Africans to rediscover their cultural Roots. Armah throws enough light on the crucial problem that laments for quick solution. Baako’s nervous breakdown occurs because of weighty expectations of family and society. He lost clarity of vision in the quagmire of expectations imposed on him. The moment he begins to feel that their way of expectation is right, he loses his grip on his own sanity. Thus, it Is not possible for an ordinary Ghanaian to fulfill these substantial desires. African society is in transitive motion; it need to be protected from western ethos.
Ayi Kwei Armah's second novel Fragments (1970) has become much more mercenary in its manifestation, and is even taken as an established norm by the Ghanaian society.
Fragments presents the most vivid picture of materialism, ostentation, corruption, greed, selfishness and irresponsibility choking contemporary Africa. Armah's persuasive vision of alternative values is praiseworthy having the inherent potential of taming the tide of disorder in Africa. The novel's pre-eminent position within the whole corpus of postcolonial African fiction in English has not been take into account, yet Fragments is a "feat of imagination, one of the few novels in English … that deals in any compelling way with the maladies that have come with the colonial encounter" (Ogede, "Patterns of Decadence," Modern Fiction Studies 529).
Baako Onipa, the male protagonist is a well educated man with a clear vision who is a man ahead of his times with responsibilities that tower above those of the average members of his society. He has a voice that refuses to be muffled while articulating his strongly held views. He finds himself in a society that is immersed in corruption adhering to unethical values. He is involved in a selfless and corrective crusade for social redirection and leads a vanguard that warns the society and offers unsocialised advice to those in power to restore sanity in postindependent society thriving on wrong values.
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