Africa and its Other Self: the Diasporan Identity between Mirage, Myth, and Ideology in Ayi Kwei Armah’s Osiris Rising

Abstract

dream as it is motivated by practical projects sustained by a sound political vision. The unity of all the afro descendants and their brothers of the continent is at the same time a psychological healing from the centuries-long trauma self-hatred, and denigration. It further advoates a political revolution in a continent whose main problem is division. The novel reveals a poetics of a collective psychological unease. If in other books by the same writer characters are fighting to make a living in a problematic world to which they have become strangers, in Osiris Rising , the fate of the Africans of the diaspora is summed up by the title of the article about the ankh, that symbol of Africa’s redemption:‘Who are we and why’. The lament over one’s condition in a world that is not theirs is a constant concern. Chapter one sets the tone of that poetics of an existential malaise. Ast’s grandmother is a silent and sad woman. She is often impenetrable as she keeps to herself as if she were unable to convey her feelings, giving only cryptic and enigmatic answers. The narrator speaks of a ‘soul’s withdrawal’, of a ‘hardened face’ (1). When Ast as a child asks to know more about the symbolic statuette her grandmother keeps in their house, the old woman utters a few words that say much about the existential and psychological state of her mind: ‘Do you know that our people were sold into slavery?’ The descendants of these former slaves like Ast may have forgotten that part of their history. But it is still vivid in the old woman’s mind. The question raises several intractable concerns in the mind of the little girl. The search for the answers to these concerns will shape her future adult life. ‘Who sold us? What did such a betrayal mean? Was it dead history? Or does it still have the energy of news, with power to shape the future?’ (1). The narrator accounts for the young girl’s psychological state of mind and says that these questions were ‘unsettling the balance of her soul’ (1). Instead of crippling her energy, of turning her into a bitter, sad, and humiliated personality, Ast sets to find answers that will take her to where these sad events of the lives of her ancestors started: ‘home’ in Africa. The novel Journey to