11 Ayi Kwei Armah: The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born

Prof. T. Vijay Kumar

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Ayi Kwei Armah

  • Basic details about Armah and his novels
  • About The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born
  • Title
  • The context of the novel
  • The novel’s allegorical features
  • Dominant imagery

Ayi Kwei Armah (1939- )

 

•          Ghanaian writer

•          The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born (1968)

•          Fragments (1970)

•          Why Are We So Blest? (1971)

•          Two Thousand Seasons (1973)

•          The Healers (1978)

•          Osiris Rising (1995)

 

The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born (1968)

  • Armah’s first and best-known novel.
  • An allegorical tale about an unnamed railway clerk—‘the man’—and his inability fit into a society where bribery and corruption have become the norm.
  • Despite family pressure and ample opportunities, he manages to remain a non- participant in the national game of corruption.
  • Considered a fool, a failure, a coward by his family and colleagues, he himself is confused about his attitude.
  • But at the end, his self-doubts are resolved unexpectedly when the government is overthrown in a military coup.

The Beautyful Ones

  • A profoundly pessimistic novel.
  • Captured the mood of the first decade after Ghana’s independence in 1957.
  • The decade of disillusionment’.
  • Armah: “a brilliant Ghanaian novelist”, but an “alienated native”—Achebe, “Africa and Her Writers” (1972).

Title

  • The title with an intentional misspelling is taken from a slogan written on the rear of a bus.
  • Ironical juxtaposition of the philosophical profundity of the slogan and its mundane context and its corrupted expression.
  • The title “expresses the meaning of the text as accurately as any title can”—Armah.

Title

  • The bust of Queen Nefertiti, “The beautiful one has come”.
  • Excavated by Ludwig Borchardt, a German archaeologist on 6 Dec 1912.
  • Now in the Egyptian Museum in Berlin.
  •  Armah links it to Osiris, the Egyptian god of transition, resurrection, and regeneration.

Title

 

“The phrase ‘The Beautiful One’ is ancient, at least five thousand years old. To professional Egyptologists, it is a praise name for a central figure in Ancient Egyptian culture, the dismembered and remembered Osiris, a sorrowful reminder of our human vulnerability to division, fragmentation and degeneration, and at the same time a symbol of our equally human capacity for unity, cooperative action, and creative regeneration”—Armah.

Context

  • Set in post-independence Ghana of 1965-66.
  • Final months of Kwame Nkrumah’s regime.
  • Nkrumah ruled from 1957 till he was ousted in a coup on 24 Feb 1966.
  •  Freedom fighter, first Prime Minister and President of independent Ghana.
  • Criticized for promoting personality cult and for not fulfilling the expectations of the people.

Characters

  • “The man”—the unnamed protagonist.
  • Oyo—his ambitious wife.
  • Teacher—another allegorical character in whom the man often confides.
  • Joseph Koomson—classmate of ‘the man’ who becomes ‘Minister Plenipotentiary’.
  • Estella Koomson—the pretentious wife of Koomson.

AllegoryTwo major features of allegory:

 

1)    Abstract names, and 2) Belief in transformation

•      ‘The man’

•      ‘Teacher’

•      A luxury hotel—‘Atlantic-Caprice’

•      Fishing boat, an instrument of social mobility—‘Ahead’

 

Ironic gap between what the names suggest and what they are: ‘the man’—not Everyman or the Idealman but the unrepresentative man; ‘Teacher’—aloof, equally confused.

AllegoryTransformation:

  • Circular pattern.
  • Begins and ends with scenes of corruption.
  • On both occasions, the protagonist is a non-participant.
  • The more things change, the more they remain the same.
  • Regimes change but there is no transformation.
  • Denies the luxury of any complacent belief in the inevitability of change.

Imagery

  • Scatological imagery.
  • The novel is filled with “such incredible filth and shit and stink” that “it will make anybody puke”—Ama Ata Aidoo.
  • Images of filth and rot as physical signifiers of an abstract idea.
  • Physical counterpart of the protagonist’s inner self.

Two features of the decay that dominates the physical world of the novel:

  • Loss of definition: things melt into one another; lose form, obscure difference and value.
  • Failure to perform their intended function Examples:
    • Garbage bin in the street
    • Staircase banister in the man’s office

The fusion and failure of things in the physical world parallels the confusion and impotence of the man’s mind.

Conclusion

  • Not a simple story of an upright man Vs a corrupt society.
  • Nor a traditional moral tale of the eventual victory of honesty over corruption.
  • It exposes the rot that afflicts the society as well as the individual.
  • A complex novel that employs the allegorical mode only to subvert its familiar conventions.
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