“The self and the world against which it had to live”: Neocolonialism and the resistant subject in Ayi Kwei Armah’s The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born

ABSTRACT

Armah’s The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born has been read in terms of its political criticism of the native elite in Nkrumah’s post-independence Ghana, and for its treatment of individual consciousness – but these elements have been treated largely in isolation from each other. This article argues that the novel establishes a nuanced interdependency between subjectivity and the material everyday of neocolonialism, grounding its exploration of the psychic strain of such conditions on its exposé of Ghana’s neocolonial economy. Defining subjectivity in Fanonian terms, it argues that the multi-temporality of Beautyful Ones, and its treatment of its protagonist’s interiority, illustrate how the self and its socio-economic conditions are mutually constitutive, explanatory and effectual. The neocolonial circumstances that Armah’s protagonist navigates each day equip him with the consciousness to historicize his psychic malaise. In this way, the novel gestures towards what a resistant subject, responsive to such corrupt conditions, might be.

KEYWORDS:

• Ayi Kwei Armah
• African literature
• neocolonialism
• subjectivity
• postcolonialism
• Frantz Fanon

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. Although Vilashini Cooppan (2009) proposes a link on the basis of form between this Fanonian subjectivity, African literature and the theme of multiple temporalities (she calls it the “time of genre”), my reading disagrees on one important point as well as the generally broad-brush terms in which it is stated. Cooppan argues that “African novels of the neocolonial era inherit a form, as much as a content, from Fanon” (2), and that form is characterized by a temporal flux pointing backward (to African traditions), outward (to European narrative forms) and forward (to a life beyond neocolonialism). It is doubtful whether Fanon attributes equal importance to “pointing backward” with looking outward and forward for those subjects (and of course, by relation, those nations) that are emerging from colonialism. His contemporaries Amílcar Cabral and Léopold Senghor were, by comparison, explicit in both their political writing and actions about the importance of recuperating some traditions. Frantz Fanon remained sceptical of the epistemological stability of the notion of “traditional” knowledge, and of its uses for a revolutionary anti-colonialism.

2. A term originally taken from the geographer Kevin Lynch’s (1960)The Image of the City, “cognitive mapping” effectively describes an intersection of the personal and the social, which enables people to function in the urban spaces through which they move. For Jameson (1995), it is a way of understanding how the individual’s representation of his or her social world can escape the traditional critique of representations because the mapping is intimately related to practice – to the individual’s successful negotiation of space. The knowledge gained through experiencing the everyday is not subject to the critique that representation is always only a mediated version of reality, because it is representation made and remade in and through practice – through experiencing social reality, and allowing social reality to shape one’s subjectivity.

3. Here, I use performativity in Achille Mbembe’s sense; in seeking to define the “postcolonized subject,” Mbembe observes that, in the postcolony, it may well be the ability to engage in “apparently contradictory practices [that] ratify, de facto, the status of fetish that state power so forcefully claims by right. And by that same token [it] maintain[s], even while drawing upon officialese (signs, symbols), the possibility of altering the place and time of this ratification” (2001, 129).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council UK (AHRC) and the Isaac Newton Trust.

Notes on contributors

Sarah Jilani

Sarah Jilani is an AHRC–Newton Trust PhD candidate in the Faculty of English, University of Cambridge. Her research examines early postcolonial (1950s–70s) African and South Asian film and literatures for their treatments of subjectivity in relation to decolonization – considering, amongst others, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Ayi Kwei Armah and Satyajit Ray. Previously, she was a London-based freelance culture journalist, writing on books, film and contemporary art for publications including The Economist, The Times Literary Supplement, Art Review and The Independent.