Is Blindness Best?

THE LIFE AND LOVES OF MR. JIVEASS NIGGER by Cecil Brown. 213 pages. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $5.50.

FRAGMENTS by Ayi Kwei Armah. 287 pages. Houghton Mifflin. $5.95.

The new Jew in literature is black. The community of shared pain and perception that has informed the sensibilities of Jewish writers is now said to exist in its own cultural terms for the Negro writer. Two successful new novels by young black authors, each one showing different styles and talents, provide fresh proof of the assertion. The artistic concern of both is grounded on particular black responses to the universal quest for identity.

Cecil Brown, 26, and Ayi Kwei Armah, 29, have Ivy League backgrounds (Columbia, Harvard), but they are more different than alike. Brown was born in North Carolina, where at 15 he was sharecropping five acres. Armah is a Ghanaian who returned to Africa after college to write. Brown's character, "Mr. Jiveass Nigger," is really named George Washington. A black boy on a trip to Copenhagen, he is so busy hustling the world that he has forgotten whether there is anything inside his put-on. Armah's gentle protagonist, Baako Onipa, is a "been-to"--a Ghanaian who has returned from abroad--who finds that, while he has been learning to reject the jive of commercial civilization, the disease has taken corrupting root in his homeland. What links the two disparate men is their common discovery that their insides do not match the externals of their world.

Busy Bed. Since he is a black George Washington, Jiveass naturally can only tell lies. "I jive people if I don't trust them, see," he explains to a friend. And he cannot trust anyone. Distrustful and predatory, he cannot bring himself to tell even one person his right name. What he can bring himself to do is go to bed with everything female he sees. It is his chief way of relating because it is his most effective form of combat. The black lover is a true warrior, he tells himself, and "fighting every day with the foreknowledge that he can never be the victor makes him victorious every moment of his life."

But, like every good jiver, he also has a deep streak of charm, and so does Author Brown. Taking the reader into his confidence in an extraordinary postscript, Brown suggests that the whole book is a jiver's joke. George may be a caricature of the white man's mythical black, the hustling swordsman who alone can bring true satiety to a woman. On the other hand, Brown addresses George in the postscript, too, saying: "You think that your acts have been lies, but you need to realize that your creator is not some white man, but a black brother, a Nigger, a jiveass very much like yourself." Whatever else it does or does not do, Brown's tall tale definitely proves that rippling waters can also run deep.

Frantic and Languid. Armah's fiction is stiller and clearer. His second novel, Fragments, is set at a lower voltage than The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born, his first novel about the failure of revolution to inspirit his fellow Ghanaians. But contempt for his countrymen still seethes, this time because they are corruptly devoted to cars, tape recorders and neon "WELLCOME" signs at airports. Baako, his fragile hero, cannot adjust to such trinket worship. His sister's premature baby dies when the family too quickly presents it at an outdoor festival because they are anxious for the traditional gifts of money. At his job as a writer for Ghana-vision, he finds that there are only funds enough to buy TV sets for big shots and to produce documentaries glorifying the country's President. A truck driver he encounters is so desperate at the thought of losing a day's pay that he jams onto the last run of a ferry; it is so overloaded that the movement from the dock jolts him and his truck into the river, where he drowns.

Oppressed by such signs of avarice, Baako's mind cracks in a long, brilliant scene that is at once frantic and languid. Armah unwinds the entire story slowly, circling the fragments of Baako's breakdown with the sureness of an African tribal dance that seems always on the edge of monotony, yet is continually closing on the climax. For Baako, too, there is a circling. First he approaches nearer and nearer to a knowledge of what lies at his center of being. Then he is literally and figuratively encircled by others like a mad dog. In an Ibsenian ending, when he finds his truth he is left alone at its center, insane in the eyes of everyone around him.

It is, ultimately, Baako's refusal to jive that finally confirms his insanity. But what is the alternative? When George Washington decides at the end of his story to return to the U.S., he boasts, "If you're black you don't need to get at anything. You're already there. You can live right out of your insides." But Brown doesn't believe that for a moment, and neither will George after he gets home. The only answer may be the one offered by Baako's blind 80-year-old grandmother. If she had not given up trying to see order and direction in the world, she explains, she would have added to the pain of her blindness by going mad. "Do I not remember how like a captured beast I was," she says, "when I had not understood that I could understand no more?"

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