Scatology And The Aesthetics Of Vulgarity In Ayi Kwei Armah's The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born

This article considers the ways in which the Ghanaian writer, Ayi Kwei Armah (1939-present), engages in his fiction with beauty and the significance of that engagement in the cultural poetics of present day African literature. Indeed, identity seems to be regarded by the writer initially as a form of beauty encompassing not only individuals but also certain mores and customs. The absence of beauty translates the massive spread of the vulgar in terms of verbal and moral choices on the part of the population. Such a murky situation cannot be disjointed from the conspicuous lack of vision and the frustrations resulting from that lack. This article argues that the displayed scatological images in The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born (1968) are principally disturbing devices deployed by the author to indicate how moral choices come to be under threat. The myth of ugly and nefarious Africa is there with the objective of assisting people to undo the effects of reification sparkled by false beauty or the gleam. This gleam puts moral choices under monumental pressure, but the tension is resolved near the end of the novel where the gleam bad smells and nasty looks. In the end, Armah manages to create a myth of clean and moral Africa, which given the experience of the coup, many people embrace and consciously identify with.