Permanence of the Negative in Ayi Kwei Armah’s The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born

Abstract

The present essay identifies the defining feature of Armah’s first novel as changelessness in the negative carried by language steeped in scatology. It pitches this reading against Armah’s later efforts at signaling missed optimism. The later reading raises also technical considerations that should make the novel’s scatology less irritating to readers’ senses. This essay argues that the changelessness derives from the perspective that frames the novel. That perspective, cast in the metaphysical method of reflection, conceives the world as made up of things ‘ready-made’, ‘rigid’. This, the essay argues, forbids the possibility of change and regeneration that Armah reads, post facto, into the novel.