The Dismemberment And Reunion Of The African Community

Ayi Kwei Armah is one of the most revolutionary contemporary African novelists,whose works pay special attention to the diagnosis of contemporary African situation and the reconstruction of African history,especially the collective experience of Africa in the past.Two Thousand Seasons and The Healers are exactly such works.These two historical novels show a common African memory or history,a high sense of social mission and the vision of rebuilding the African Community.With regard to the concept of a community,T?nnies is the first person to develop “community” from a general concept to a sociological concept,and divides the community into three forms: kinship,neighborhood and comradeship.It emphasizes the intimate relationship between people,the common spiritual consciousness,as well as the sense of belonging and identity to the community.Therefore,T?nnies' s community theory can comprehensively analyze the three aspects of family,neighborhood and friendship in these two novels.This paper takes Two Thousand Seasons and The Healers as the research objects.Firstly,in third chapter,it analyzes the physical and mental injuries suffered by the black groups in the two neighborhood communities,Anoa(the same name as the priestess)and Ashanti.On one hand,there is a break in the mother-child relationship,husband-wife marriage relationship and brother-sister relationship in the kinship community;on the other hand,it is not uncommon for people to compete with each other,the deterioration of the natural environment,the imbalance between men and women,colonists' religious indoctrination and so on in the neighborhood.The fourth chapter analyzes that the causes of the breakdown of community in the novels are mainly the power struggle of the African ruling class and colonialism.The fifth chapter analyzes the methods of reuniting the community embodied in the novels.First of all,through the writing strategy of rewriting history,Armah destroys the positive image of legendary leaders in African history,which aims to reveal the defects of African monarchy which is vulnerable to foreign conquest and domination,and call on the black community to face up to their internal mistakes.Secondly,some black groups formed a spiritual community of mutual aid and mutual assistance after being physically and mentally tortured,and put into action to repair the division of the society.In addition,Armah constructs and maintains the collective identity through the first-person plural narration,calling on African elites to return to African culture and draw strength from it to liberate Africa.Armah's reinterpretation of African history as an insider can restore Africans' confidence in their own history and culture on the one hand,and find a way to heal wounds on the other.Combined with the community ideas of Armah and T?nnies,this paper holds that Africa-centered collective efforts and mutual assistance can ensure the African road and get rid of the influence of slavery,colonialism and neo-colonialism.