Carnival Ambivalence in Ayi Kwei Armahs The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet BornJoseph Arko, PhD Department of English, University of Cape Coast

Introduction

The excremental and other scatological imagery which Ayi Kwei Armah employs in his first published novel, The Beautiful Ones Are Not Yet Born, has never failed to fascinate and repel commentators. Some of the most reputable earliest reactions came from Collins (1971), Yankson (1971), Obiechina (1976), and Priebe (1976). Armahs portrayal of post-colonial Ghana contains so much bleak symbolism as to provoke many critics into a monologic concentration on the novels pessimistic vision. There is no denying, however, of Armahs talent in presenting a single man who is determined to live his life with integrity. It should be admitted, therefore, that there is a certain kind of interplay in the novel between an entropic environment and an aesthetic vision of hope. Etsy (1999) makes a note of some of the critics who have provided useful catalogues of excremental images, and mentions Mbembes (1992) analysis of vulgar images, which both represent and resist power, suggesting the radical ambiguity of scatological imagery. In spite of all of that there still remains a sustained attempt at theoretical explanation of Armahs deployment of scatology in the novel. Lazarus (1990:46) admits to the difficulty for critics to reconcile the apparently unresolved binaries between the novels affirmative vision and degraded reality. To address this situation Lazarus calls for a projective capacity on the part of readers to focus not just on the existing social order but on the texts inner gaze which seems to be directed beneath and beyond the surface. In this paper I demonstrate that Bakhtins theory of the carnival can provide readers with that projective capacity to transcend the conflictual dichotomies between the novels inner vision of hope, and its decadent environmental images of despair.

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Armahs obvious link with the Martinican psychiatrist, Frantz Fanon in The Beautiful Ones (see for instance Fraser (1980)), underlines his concern for revolution and the resistance of the underclass to neo-colonial hegemony. Bakhtins theory of the carnival provides an analysis of how the underclass may enter into a dialogic engagement with the hegemonising discourses of the ruling classes. In Rabelais and His World, Bakhtin (1984) analyses the social function of the carnivalesque and the role of grotesque symbolism, imagery and language in the work of the 16th century writer, Francois Rabelais. As Faulker (1999) points out, carnival used such linguistic metaphors as abuse and cursing, death, copulation, birth, renewal, dismemberment, and pregnancy to capture the imagery of carnival Zeigeist. Carnival was the reaction of the underprivileged against the life of the elite which to the medieval people meant fear, humiliation and submission. Faulkner argues that the aspiration of carnival is first of all to refuse to acquiesce to the legitimacy of the present system. It functions to uncover, undermine, even to destroy the hegemony of any ideology that seeks to have a final word about the world, and also to renew, to shed light upon life and the meanings it harbours. In The Beautyful Ones Armah uses imagery that is clearly carnivalesque, and as it was in the Rabelaisian world, the purpose of such imagery in the Armah novel is to degrade those vertical structures that entrench social differentiation. In this paper I argue that Armahs imagery has the carnival dynamism that not only degrades the hegemonising structures of society, but also provides for the regeneration of life.

Bakhtinian Chronotopes

In a Bakhtinian reading of any novel it is always necessary to keep his other theories within easy access. As Lee (1992) rightly noted, Bakhtins theoretical concepts need to be understood according to the logic of his entire theoretical field. It will therefore not be enough to merely extract the notion of the carnival and apply it ad-hoc to any historical period or range of texts. Carnival itself needs to be productively understood in terms of a

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dialogue with Bakhtins other theories. It is for this reason that I will begin the analysis of the carnivalesque in The Beautyful Ones with an account of the Chronotopes in the novel. Cyss-Wittenstein (2000) notes that Bakhtins theory of the Chronotope directs the readers attention to time-space dimensions as they occur in a narrative. The Chronotope seeks to explore how elements of time and space structure the plot, and what they imply about the characters and the issues at hand. For Bakhtin a Chronotope is the organising centre for the narrative events of the novel. He defines the chronotope as

The intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships that are artistically expressed in literature In literary artistic chronotope, spatial and temporal indicators are fused into one completely thought out concrete whole. Time, as it were thickens, takes on flesh, becomes charged and responsive to the movements of time, plot and history. The intersection of axes and the fusion of indicators characterises the artistic chronotope. (quoted in Cys- Wittenstein 2000)

Bakhtin mentions a long list of chronotopes that can be found in European literature; the chronotope of the road, of the castle, of parlours and salons, of provincial towns, of town houses and estates of the nobility, of nature, of the family idyll, of labour idyll. While The Beautyful Ones can be analysed in terms of a number of chronotopes, Armahs art will require the modification of certain aspects of the theory.

The chronotope of the workplace: the labour idyll

One chronotope that may be identified in The Beautyful Ones is the chronotope of the work place. Armahs protagonist, who is known throughout the novel simply as the man, works at the Administration Block of the railways and harbours. The spatial indicators in the work place chronotope may not necessarily relate to any external location but there is sufficient information to assume that the railway office is at the southern terminal of the Ghanaian western railway line running between Takoradi and Kumasi. But more important than this are the internal spatial indicators which situate this office in relation to other local features. The mans way to the office takes him past the Post Office, along the row of old commercial buildings - the U.T.C., the GNTC and the French CFAO. Behind these commercial buildings is the Yensua Hill on which stands the Atlantic

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Caprice Hotel. Down the road from the CFAO are the food stands, opposite of which is the railway office. The spatial location of the mans office is given with a lot of material detail. This contrasts with the temporal indicators in this chronotope. There are only vague references to the independence regime of Ghana and to the overthrow of the Nkrumah government. Internal temporal indicators are even vaguer. There is no mention of days or months or season of the year. There is an atmosphere of timelessness associated with this chronotope. As Cys-Wittenstein (2000) notes, even though Bakhtin states that the chronotope permits the imaging power of art to do its work, he never explains how this is done. What Cys-Wittenstein does then is to adopt Paul Ricouers notion of metaphorical truth to show how a texts chronotope may communicate meaning beyond its significance as concretizing representation. For Ricouer, the notion of metaphorical truth is at the core of the redescriptive powers of language. Its essential quality is one of tension between description and redescription, as it occurs in metaphor and poetry; one of paradox between what is and what is not yet. Ricouer (cited in CyssWittenstein 2000) argued that the paradox consists in the fact that there is no other way to do justice to the notion of metaphorical truth than to include the literal incision of is not and the ontological vehemence of the metaphorical is. To apply this understanding to Bakhtins chronotope is to allow the element of time and space to acquire significance beyond mere concretizing representation and to convey truth of a metaphorical nature. The spatial indicators in the work place chronotope represent a railway office which is in direct access to the commercial powers. This understanding is reinforced by the fact that it is the railway that conveys the Tarkwa gold and Aboso manganese to the waiting Greek ships (p.20/21). Topography in this chronotope is very significant. The eating shelters, patronized by the lower rank workers of the railways is down the CFAO. The vertical differentiation is obvious. But even more significant is how the railway office and the commercial houses together relate to the gleam of the Atlantic Caprice. Armahs behind may be a pun exploring not only a spatial relation but also an ideological relation in which the gleam gives support and vertical legitimacy to the commercial houses,

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On the top of the hill commanding it just as it commanded the scene below, its sheer flat multi-storied side an insulting white in the concentrated gleam of the hotels spotlights, towered the useless structure of the Atlantic Caprice (p.10) . (my italics)

What Armah does here is to foreground all those elements which entrench vertical structures in society and present them as being in accessible relationship with the mans railway office. Armahs chronotope of the work place therefore does not have the normal features of a Bakhtianian chronotope of the labour idyll. Armahs work place is an essential part of the hegemonising structures put up by the ruling bloc.

Central to the chronotope theory is the notion of metamorphosis, which is the methodological sheath for the idea of development. Metamorphosis comes at the merging of time and space when history seems to have thickened and has become material. As Jasmine Rault explains, the idea of metamorphosis originated in mythology and religion, and is especially linked with the mysteries. It is associated with change, focusing on sudden revolutions, crises, where human life irreversibly changes its direction. In Armahs chronotope of the work place, however, time forever fails to merge with space to generate the massive events that may lead to change. Time at his workplace is an artifice manipulated into a circular movement denying any directedness into the future. The anguish of the night clerk whom the man relieves is that nothing happened throughout the night of his duty. The frightening sameness of the lonely time is marked by dead nights pierced only by departing sounds of goods trains, the distant beat of drums creating happiness for some who can afford, the sudden blast of car horns coming briefly and getting swallowed again forever and the mocking rattle of the morse machine, the brief pay days and the perennial Passion Weeks. The unending circularity of time may be represented in the symbolism of the painted rusted fan, which traveled with such tired slowness (p.20). Wright (1989) notes that

In the novel of contemporary setting as in the novel of traditional society, time is marked by what happens in it and has no existence apart from events, but in Armahs railway office nothing is happening.

One would say that the Bakhtinian convergence of time and space, which should bring about change, is endlessly deferred. Wright argues that the mans work in the business of Page 5 of 30

Time Allocation provides time with the physical contours which suit well the slow endless round of the poor for whom times movement is repetitive in the horizontal round of non-achievement. But the man did not come to the Railway office to be licked into a synchronic embrace of time. He had a view to the future, whose deferral seems now permanent.

The Railway office is a space that dissolves dreams. That is why the man can reckon that the young night relief who takes over from him, will be like all the rest who cannot fly from the unredeemed cycle of impotence:

No doubt being only new, he was calculating in his undisappointed mind that he will stay here only for a short while and like a free man fly off to something closer to his soul. What in his breeziness he has to know is this: that his dream was not his alone, that everyone before him had crawled with hope along the same unending path, dreaming of future days when they would crawl no longer but run if they wanted to run, and fly if the spirit moved them. But along the streets, those who can soon learn to recognise in ordinary faces beings whom the spirit moved, but still cannot follow where it beckons, so heavy are the small ordinary days of the time. (p.33)

The cyclical deferral of historical materialisation is made worse by the socio-economic gaps visible at the office. As a morse operator, the man finds himself flung upon an architectonic of extreme verticality which mirrors the situation in the world outside the railway headquarters. The social differentiation at the office space is seen in the order in which the day workers arrive. First, there were the small boys, and the messengers, then the other clerks, followed at 9.30 by the senior service men. Armahs reaction to this verticalised space is to submit the entire work place to horizontalising treatment of carnival besmirching. There is grotesquerie in the senior service mens imitation of European mannerisms,

Each with a left over British craziness. This one has a long white hose, that one colonial white white. Another has spent two months on what he still calls a study tour of Britain, and ever since wore, in the heat of Ghana, waist-coats and coats. He would have been made Obedient Boy of the British Empire (p.109) .

The senior staff are not alone in this grotesque imitation of British behaviour. The overtime clerks aping of the Southern English accent links the junior staff with the senior staff in their common decadence. Armah uses the excremental grid and other Page 6 of 30

scatological images to further remove the barriers between the senior and the junior officers. Bakhtin points out that in carnival, verbal mudslinging refers to the ancient gesture of besmirching not with mud but with excrement. Zwart (2000) notes that the function of scatological images and other forms of verbal abuse is not merely a negative phenomenon. He insists that in the case of Rabelais, the function of the defecation series, as Bakhtin calls it, is crucial in the process of degradation. The defecation series creates the most unexpected matrices of objects, phenomena and ideas which are destructive of hierarchy and materialises the picture of the world and of life. Armah degrades not only the staff at the office but the railway building as well. The squat Administrative Block is covered with layers of paint and distemper mostly of the official murk-yellow and

Caressed thoroughly by the brown dust blowing off the roadside together with the swirling grit of the coal and the gravel of the railway yard within and behind p.10/11).

The banister, whose description occurs in an oft quoted passage, not only symbolises the unconquerable power of decay but also as an image of liminality, links all officials in the block in the common process of decay. The effect of Armahs excremental and other carnivalesque imagery is not only to pour scorn on the hegemony of the ruling bloc, of which the railway office is an essential part, it is also to degrade the powerful elite and all those who accede to their hegemony to the bodily lower stratum.

The chronotope of the home: the family idyll

Another chronotope that may be identified situates the man in his home and depicts him as a family man. The socio-economic status of the mans family becomes clear only in terms of their relation with the family of Koomson. As Wright (1989) notes, Armahs urban sociology demonstrates how vertical divisions of the family, kinship and ethnic groups cut asymmetrically across horizontal class divisions so that the values of the big men in the family infiltrate and compromise those of their poor relations. Along this space is the influence of Koomsons family on the mans family. While it is difficult to associate their respective homes with any external location, there are internal indicators

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which project a topographical representation of their socioeconomic classes. The man lives in a dormitory town, beyond the stretch of free sea line (p.40). Koomson lives at the Upper Residential Area on the hills beyond the new Esikafo Aba Estates (p.140) (my italics). Koomsons plush neighbourhood is frequented only by white men, old lawyers, bigger Party men and a few civil servants.

The vertical gap between the two homes foregrounds the socio-economic realities that differentiate them. To get to the mans dormitory town, the bus goes past the musty railway loco yard, over the iron bridge around the central rubbish heap, past the big public lavatory and the public bath. The decay, stench and putrescence along this route contrasts with the way to Koomsons home:

Series of narrow twisting roads between rows of identical houses, story apartments each with its detached servants quarters (p.142)

The spatial indicators here affiliate Koomson with the powerful social elite, while the man definitely is of the underclass. In the world of the novel, it is the mans family that is far from being idyllic. Fraser (1980:10) points out that the mans family is frustrated by poverty and deferred expectations, are pinched and resentful. Time, as it were, is at a stand still, preventing a convergence with space to provide the leap which will regenerate their life. It seems it is rather Koomson who has the demotic energy required for this regeneration. The psychic pain of the stasis in the mans home is exacerbated by the vertical gap that exists between his family and Koomsons family. Even though the man, in Bakhtinian sense, eats, drinks and defecates, it is Koomson who does these on a grand scale. Food indeed is scarce in the mans home and no wonder constipation is their natural affliction. There is an inversion in Armahs art in which the oppressed other has no ebullient carnivalesque expansion. What makes carnivalesque expansion visible in the mans home is its absence. The mans cosmic anguish is even more unbearable because it seems that unlike him, time for Koomson has thickened and has become visible. Koomson, it seems to the mans wife, has been able to take his life into his hands and taken the risk of

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jumping over the chasm of time. It is for this reason that Koomson is the one considered not only to have done well for himself but also been able to relieve the burden of others. Armahs art demonstrates how the elite may engage themselves in carnival without providing access to regeneration for the masses. Koomson, big and tall, raucous and irreverent, who can even bring the awesome powers of officialdom to ridicule, has all the trappings of a Rabelaisian great man. There is evidence here that the dominant classes can create spaces for false carnivals, spaces that provide the illusion of hybridity and blurred boundaries obscuring the univocal and monologic quality of the dominant sign (see Lucas, 2000). In accepting to drink local beer and joking about the drunkenness of the attorney general, Koomson attempts to evoke laughter not to humanise the potent forces of government but to limit the parameters for oppositional discourse and practice, therefore diverting energy away from conceptualising the elite as a monolithic entity.

Koomson in a way always maintains the formal gap between him and the man. He reserves for himself the right to decide on when to visit the man and to keep the visit within the constraints of his own schedules. Koomsons refusal to use the lavatory in the mans home is a stress on the vertical gap between them. The vertical gap between the two is made clearer by the familial spaces where they respectively dwell. I have already noted Koomsons relocation to the Upper Residential Area on the hills beyond Esikafo Aba Estates. We see the verticalisation, firstly, in relation with the degree of cleanliness in the respective homes. Fraser (1980) affirms that cleanliness is always seen as a release from the familiar squalor, a glamorous escape from the cloying social circumstance. As such it is the counterpoise to all those images of excrement and putrefaction in which the novel is so rich. One can talk about the mans mice infested room clogged with smug furniture and the rottenness that resists cleaning. Koomsons living room on the other hand has all the things of for a human being to spend the rest of their life time desiring (p.144). The key words there are glint and sparkle. As Fraser (1980) points out, talking of the extravagant existence she so much envies in Estella, Oyo, the mans bitten wife, puts the difference between them thus: It is

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clean, the life Estella is getting (p.44). Cleanliness in this chronotope is the mark of modernity and elitism. It summarises for Oyo what she has all the time desired for herself but which time has never failed to defer. But the man carnivalises Esthers cleanliness by flinging dung on it: Some of that cleanliness has more rotteness than the bottom of the garbage dump (ibid). The topographical reference in bottom dislodges Esther from her breezy hill top residence to the cloying slime beneath the dung hill. The term, cleanliness, in Armahs imagination is thus ambiguous. He so merges the mans physical squalor and Koomsons aesthetic decay that there seems to be no real difference between them. Of course the mans rooms are not glinting with cleanliness, and his bathroom and toilet reek with decay and putrescence. But cleanliness has also an aesthetic value, which puts the man ahead of Koomson.

Another difference between the two homes has to do with prevailing odours. It is in the nature of decaying things to exude bad odour. The man has to hold his breath when he is in his bathroom, and Koomson cannot use the mans toilet for the unquenchable smell it exudes. Harkin (1998) writes about smell as a semiotic sign. He reminds us that the smell of putrescence speaks of death and the smell of bodily excretions warn people of health risks. The smells that prevail in the mans home are in sharp contrast with the perfumes on Estellas body. But there is an ambivalence with odour as a semiotic sign, which can be well accounted for by the use of Bakhtins theory of carnival. Harkin notes the word carnival itself is redolent with smells: of burning meat, intestinal gas, axillary and genital secretions. The nose itself which smells is the focus of carnivaleque performances. Harkin notes that the use of odour in humour is widespread. The word humour itself is related to odour, since it refers to the four humours or internal fluids the balance of which was to give people distinctive personalities and organic essences (including odour). The use of ordour in scatological images deals with the tension of social distance in two ways: First they stress the commonality of all humans. As every fart is an intimation of the decay of death, the maintenance of social boundaries is seen to be futile. In the medieval carnivals scatological humour and social movements were based on liminality and

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communitas. Odour undermines all human projects along these lines reminding us of our common mortality. The fetid smells in the mans home dovetail into the general association of bad smells with the lower classes. According to Harkin, this association goes back to antiquity. Even though strong smells pervade the entire world of The Beautyful Ones, the Koomsons, like the aristocrats of the past, maintain their private home and persons with rich and beautiful scents. Odour as a semiotic sign marks identity and alterity and reflects the socioeconomic structure of the society. The use of odour in The Beautyful Ones therefore is a sign marking class distinctions of the perfumed elite and the smelly subaltern.

The ambivalence of smell as a semiotic sign however enables Armah to demolish the verticalising structures between the powerful Koomson and the powerless man. It seems that at the instance of the coup, time, for the family chronotope, eventually comes merging with space to provide the metamorphosis in change. The coup itself may be part of the national chronotope, but it changes Koomsons personal life beyond recognition. The man himself is surprised at the change in Koomsons manner. He remembers the last time Koomson visited and wonders at the great contrast with the super confidence of the days gone by. The man is aware that in the nation itself nothing actually will change with the coup,

But here was real change. The individual man of power now shivering, his head filled with fear of vengeance of those he had wronged. For him everything was going to change. (p.162)

Koomsons degradation is reflected in the kind of smells he exudes:

The smell was something the man had not at all expected. It was overpowering, as if some corrosive gas, already half liquid, filled the whole room, irritating not only the nostrils, but also the inside, of eyes, ears, mouth, throat. (p.161)

The foregrounding of carnival convexities here should be noted. Koomson is now the one irradiating the smells of the lower bodily stratum. In fact he has about him all the forgotten smells of the earth, which Freud claims have been repressed since man became

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a biped and began to walk upright, removing himself from the ground and the smells of that region, and therefore developing a distaste for it (see Harkin, 1998):

He had the rich stench of rotten menstrual blood. The man held his breath until the new smell had gone down with the liquid atmosphere of the Party mans farts and filling the room. At the same time Koomsons insides gave a growl longer than usual, the inner fart of personal, corrupt thunder in its fullness sounded as if it had rolled down all the way from the eating throat thundering through the belly and the guts, to end further silent pollution of the air already thick with flatulent fear (p.163).

The eating throat, the belly and the guts are well known sites for carnival performances. Koomson is now the one exuding estrus and all the fetid smells of the earth and the lower bodily stratum. He is not only degraded to the smelly underclass, he has now about him all the earthy primitive smells man stopped emitting since he became a biped. Harkin has noted that the Ongee associated odour with breath, which is viewed in many cultures as the soul. In fact the Latin spiritus means breath. What Armah does with Koomson is to metaphorically merge his material part with the immaterial, the tangible with the intangible. At the merging of time and space in the family chronotope, Koomsons spirit comes expressed in material terms in the form of a most disgusting odour. The man finds the stink unsupportable. This Koomson, whose previous visit had provoked in the mans home such a flurry of spending, cleaning and cooking can now only elicit acute discomfort and resentment.

The Chronotope of the nation: the national idyll

The chronotope of the nation space dominates and determines the chronotopes of the family and the work place. The temporal indicators characterise a previously colonial country, and the scraps of images of the pre-colonial, colonial and postcolonial times reveal the parameters under which the people live. The frustrations and despair felt at home are the effects of a national level stasis that make it impossible for time to merge with space to provide the metamorphosis that will break into the future. The shifts from the traditional society to the colonial society and to a post-colonial society were mere repetitions and illusions of change.

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Wright (1989:100) observes that in the Ghana of the novel, it is the nature of things to heap up, of speed to ossify into mass, of time to solidify into described objects. Wright notes that the tired stand-still of the first part of the novel abound with images of stopped flow: halted trains and uncollected refuse, showers blocked with scum and streams with filth, pockets piled with old tickets and coastal strips with junk. The mountains of consumer waste which stretch back to the days of the slave chiefs become metaphors for the recollected past still visible in the present. Wright talks about a backward motion of time to a still visible point of terminal stagnation, a storehouse of heaped up centuries that have not gone out of existence. For Wright the idea is of a slow accumulation of the debris of history into a visible performance in which everything that has ever happened is apprehended simultaneously as if it were happening at once and were a perpetuating present. In Wrights view the novel is concerned with independent Africas self repeating cycle of slavish dependence on the white world and the treadmill lives of the victims. In fact, the novel is about all the devourers who have decimated Africa, since the time of the slave chiefs. The pain of the ordinary subject in this novel is that, the agitation for independence and the subsequent coup that comes at the end of the novel lead to no change. In the person of Koomson it is possible to see both the slave chiefs and the white colonisers. The man on a visit to Koomsons home wonders if anything has changed from the days when chiefs sold their people for trinkets. Teacher on his part compares Komson to the white colonialists:

He lives in a way that is more painful to see than the way the white men had always lived here There is no difference then. No difference at all between the white men and their apes, the lawyers and the merchants, and the apes of apes, our Party men. And after their reign is over, there will be no difference ever. All new men will be like the old. (p.89)

The whole idea of independence is a ruse to perpetuate white domination by getting a few Africans to share in the privileged life of the colonists. The pain of Teacher is that the promises of independence did not blossom into the revolution, the waking of the powerless. (p.85). The promised revolution has been in vain, and not even the Nkrumaists are saviours:

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It should be easy to see there have never been people to save anybody but themselves, never in the past, never now, and there will never be any saviours if each will not save himself. No saviours, only the hungry and the fed . Deceivers all. (p.90)

But indeed for the Party men, lawyers and the merchants, Independence indeed brought change. They have acquired their gleaming white bungalows, long heavy cars and their women. The president himself has moved to the old slave castle, and the big men can send their children to kindergartens in Europe. It is the graft and the consumption of a recurring cycle of leaders that provokes Armahs preoccupation with corruption. It should not be assumed that Armah directs his scorn only at the elite who have oppressed the people. In fact, in Armahs imagination the distinctions between the oppressed and the oppressor are removed and in the corrupt image of the nation, both the oppressed and the oppressor have the same representation. The culpability of the bus conductor and the empathy between the lowly railway workers and the young corrupt politician changing cars and women, removes any such barriers between the powerful and the powerless, the rich and the poor in this process of decay.

Armah, furthermore, uses carnival elements to break down the barriers of time: the present and the past; and the barriers of class: the elite and the subaltern. Teacher wonders at the obscene haste at which the nationalists have grown rotten. Armahs vocabulary revolves round the excremental grid, arseholes, prosperous looking bellies, young, juicy vaginas, paunches; such language as reduces the object to the lower bodily stratum. He, for example, refers to the burgeoning party ideologues as the shit of the country. Armahs disgust is directed at the civil servant, the poet and any such lackey

Serving power and waiting to fill their coming paunch with crumbs. He will no doubt jump to go and fit his tongue into new arses when new men spring to shit on us. (p.89)

There is punning here when Armah scorns the elite as apes and as apes of apes. The degradation makes the lawyers, merchants and Party men indistinguishable from the lower primates.

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Another carnival element Armah uses to degrade the elite is the parody. The old lawyers desiring to supplant the white colonialists are unable to deceive anybody as their antics are met with bouts of carnival laughter. These agitators and their rallies were for the people nothing serious; the only reason the people went there was that it made their day less heavy and gave them something to laugh about. Bakhtins project of the carnivalesque offers a way of playing with the opposition between the elitist dictums and concrete reality by mocking and parodying public pronouncements that differ from the peoples own existential experiences and by carnivalising the seriousness of their plans that are proclaimed as scientific facts (see Heineken, 2000). While the ruling stratum tries to posit a single discourse as exemplary, the subaltern classes are inclined to subvert this monologic closure (see Brandist, 2005). Teacher recounts how Este and his friends become constituted into a laughing chorus and act out the ridiculous performances of the politicians, as a way of coming to terms with their alterity. Scott-Dixon (1998) notes that ironic parody is associated with grotesquerie and is typical with carnival. Parody is also linked with external public expression of disordered inner state. By means of carnivalesque parody the masses gain a momentary relief from the death dealing seriousness of the status-quo. As Lindsey (1993) observes, in Bakhtin carnival does indeed mean subversion; it means a great deal more than that: carnival is ludic interchange that presupposes the existence of social spaces inviting suppressed alterity to manifest itself in a way that will affect the status quo. Yankson (2000:1) has recognised that Armahs pre-occupation is with

How we Ghanaians and Africans in general live and how we ought to live. In fact Armahs five published novels can in a sense be regarded as studies in the African soul.

Yankson goes on to categorise the characters in the novel as (a) diseased souls, and (b) healthy souls. Fraser (1980) throws some light on this point in his attempt at diagnosing what he thinks afflicts the diseased souls of Africa. According to Fraser, Africas affliction

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Fundamentally appears to betray itself as almost obsessive distrust, a determination to dismiss everything of local inspiration while admiring everything which originates abroad.

Wright (1989) identifies Armah with Fanon, who saw the black man as fighting from within the prison house of racial concepts, political myths and national boundaries: no matter which way he turned to divest his psychic geography of colonial structures, he was led into deeper whiteness. Armah, therefore, in The Beautyful Ones is concerned with the cultural dilemmas of Ghana as a post-colonial country. Armahs scorn is indeed directed against black men with white souls and names trying mightily to be white (p.126).

Armah seems to be pre-occupied with the post-colonial assault on African culture and way of life, in which to appear and behave like a white man is thought to be modernity, elitist and desirable, while Africaness is supposed to be associated with subalternity and undesirable. The parody provides Armah with a form to direct his disgust at the nationalist elite, who are straining all their energies to be like the white man. Teacher says there is something terrible watching a black man trying all point to become the dark ghost of a European (p.81). The ordinary people subject the lawyers to billingsgate, calling them yessir men, eunuch lawyers old baboons. To the parodist the old lawyers have lost their manhood trying to be white. Their campaign speeches were nothing but the drooling tale of an idiot (p.82). It was carnival laughter that helped the people to survive; and yet there comes the new lawyer, who speaks with such sincerity that he, ironically, deprives the parodists of the little joys they have in life:

Even Este could find nothing to joke about, though the thought that everything was turning serious was killing him inside (p.87).

Lazarus (1990) observes that the masses rejection of the nationalist leadership in the decolonising years implies the existence of a raw and precious level of political awareness on the part of the masses. These, according to Lazarus, were times when the masses were beginning to find and test their strength. They were beginning to entertain thoughts about shaping their own future. The old lawyers behaved as if they had a secret power behind them, and that is why they were stunned by the peoples unbelief. They tried to raise themselves above the people forgetting that at the carnival square of the Page 16 of 30

political rally verticalising structures cannot stand. As Stallybrass and White (quoted in Hutson, 2000:141) declare, the history of political struggle has been the history of the attempts to control significant sites of assembly and spaces of discourse. What Armah does in the national chronotope is to deal with the frightening seriousness of the peoples alterity within the cyclical rounds of despair. Carnival laughter and imagery serve not only to dispel their fear but also to confront the vertical structures the elite have entrenched in society.

Carnival, degeneration and regeneration Some commentators have taken issue with Armahs use of scatological images. Ama Atta Aidoo, for instance, does not see the necessity for hammering the excremental smells of Ghanaians and Ghana at every page of the novel (see Collins 1992). Achebe (1975), on his part, finds the scatological images foreign and unusable. It is those images, Achebe argues, that create the novels aura of cosmic sorrow and despair. Etsy (1999) claims that Armah uses excremental language to perform an extended Freudian unmasking or desublimation. According to Etsy, Armah reordorises money, converting it into shit and forcing us to see wealth as polished waste, reducing the compradors foreign cars, fancy hotels, and luxury goods to excremental status and denouncing them as the cruellest form of excess. I have thus far tried to demonstrate that the excremental grid and other scatological images function to remove the disturbing vertical gaps in society. I intend now to show that Armahs imagery serves to provide a reading beyond the monologic discourse of despair to offer a dialogic interaction between despair and hope. In this reading, unlike in Wrights (1990) analysis, regenerative forces do not only counter degenerative forces, the former dwell in the latter. It is true that some commentators, like Yankson (2000), have noted the mans recognition that out of dung comes forth the flowering of new life. It remains, however, to demonstrate that it is the carnival ambivalence of corruption and decay that compels the reading that the novel is preoccupied not only with the cycles of decay and death, but also with regeneration and birth. Teacher talks of birth in terms of

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Helpless messes of soft flesh and unformed bone squeezing through motherholes, trailing dung and exhausted blood (p.62).

What Armah does here is to blur the boundaries between death and birth and to explore the middle spaces between them, bringing them so close that one seems to resemble the other. Wright (1990) admits that in The Beautyful Ones corruption is not seen as an absolute evil but as part of natures on-going regenerative process;

it is part of the dynamic continuity out of which grow new flowering from dung, newseed from rotten fruit, new life from death and decomposition.

The novel foregrounds the idea that all life is fated to undergo decay. In fact Armah mixes the words life/death, youth/aged, good food/smelly shit, and puts them in a symbolic relation to each other. Armah again merges together the human and the natural, the animate and the inanimate to account for the lives not only of individuals but also of the nation. Some commentators have expressed reservations about Armahs merging of the natural and the human and his use of physical processes to judge human understanding, attempting through it to get moral issues in focus (see Wright 1989:87). There is Armahs implicit use of physical ripening and rotting as a yardstick to measure moral behaviour. What is most difficult for these commentators to reconcile themselves with is Armahs analogising human weakness to natural processes and establishing corruption as an innate natural process to which even the man cannot be exempted. Wright argues that if the analogies were literalised into absolutes then the mans own moral position will be unnatural. Wright claims that there is no evidence of such absolutes established. In spite of Wrights forceful analysis, the argument being pursued in this paper is that Bakhtins theory of the carnival provides a form of analysis which recognises and accounts for those absolutes which unite human weakness and natural processes.

In Rabelais and His World, Bakhtin explains that degradation and debasement do not have a formal and relative character in the grotesque realism. Upward and downward in Bakhtins analysis have an absolute and strictly topographical meaning. Downward is

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the earth and upward is heaven. Earth is the element that devours, swallows up (the grave, the womb), and at the same time the element of birth and of renascence. In the Bakhtinian analysis, to degrade is to bury, to sow and to kill simultaneously, in order to bring forth something more and better. To degrade an object is not merely hurling it into the void of non-existence, into absolute destruction, but to hurl it down to the reproductive lower stratum, the zone in which conception takes place. It is here that despair and hope may enter into a dialogic interpellation. Armahs excremental imagery is therefore meant not only to express his revulsion and despair but also to foreground his hope in the regeneration of life that results from the natural processes of decay.

Bakhtinian grotesque realism, for instance, throws light on the rhetorical function of Armahs old man-child, the freakish oddity which Aboliga the Frog brings to show his friends. It is correct, as Wright does, to assume that the old man-child indeed symbolizes the Ghanaian nation, which is projected as having passed through childhood, maturity and old age at a shocking monstrous pace. Priebe (1976) was among the first commentators to apply the idea of liminality to Armahs imagery and the symbolic structure of his work. Priebe sees the luminal figure as one surrounded by symbols of death and decomposition, and not yet incorporated into a new state, it is also surrounded by symbols of birth and resurrection.

The emphasis in Armah is the element of the grotesque. The idea that this monstrosity has its own nature brings into focus the closeness of life and death. The man child is in immediate proximity to both death and birth, to infancy and old age, for the womb or for the grave, to the bosom that gives it life or to the grave that swallows it up (Bakhtin 1984). Armahs oddity resembles very much Kerchs figurines of old pregnant hags, which Bakhtin comments about as very typical and strongly expressed grotesque. They are monstrous, de-formed by pregnancy and by the decay of aging. Inscribed in their bodies is the fatality of human life and death and within it the growth of and yet unformed living matter (Bakhtin 1984: 25-26). Armahs man-child has a body that is dying yet is unfinished and it stands both at the threshold of the grave and the crib. This liminal body therefore defies all set boundaries, and in Bakhtinian analysis, it is blended with

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animals, with objects. It is cosmic, it represents the entire material bodily world in all its elements, the absolute lower stratum that swallows up and generates. The grotesque is the image of this becoming, the boundaries between person and person, person and thing, are erased as the individual merges with the people and the whole cosmos. As the individual body is transcended, the biological body is negated and the body of historical, progressing mankind moves to the centre of images. With the carnival focus on death and rebirth, the individual body dies but the body of the people lives and grows; biological life ends but historical life continues (see Brandist, 2005). Armahs old man child therefore does not merely evoke horror and disgust; the ambivalence of this monstrosity makes the thought of regeneration and birth possible. Armahs image of the rubbish heap has the same ambivalence. When he talks about uncollected garbage, spiraling dung hills and junk, which seem to clutter the entire space of the novel, it is at times difficult to draw a line between the symbolic and the literal. Pathological consumerism has produced all this rubbish and corruption has diverted funds for their disposal. While it is the poor who have to live with the mountains of refuse, the rich who have joined the white colonialist on the white mans hill, are those who are degraded by the symbolism of refuse, which their rapacious consumption has generated. Additionally, as Stam (1998) argues, like death and excrement, garbage is a great social leveller. It is the lower stratum of the social collective, the symbolic bottom of the body politic. Stam insists that the truth of a society is in its detritus. According to Stam, in West and Central Africa, the rubbish heap is a metaphor for the grave, a point of contact with the world of the dead. Stam recounts that a vernacular philosopher in the film Thread of Memory tells film makers that garbage is the beginning and the end of the cyclical principle of birth and rebirth. Garbage is shown as a stored energy containing in itself the seed of its own transformation. The garbage dump becomes the critical vantage point from which to view society as a whole. In Bakhtins conception of the carnival, all that is low and connected to the earth is creative; what is connected to death is life and rebirth. The carnival world, therefore, is directed to the underworld, the earthly and the bodily. In The Beautyful Ones the greed and rapacity of the consumeristic society is

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revealed in the detritus it creates, but this decaying matter is the same material that should regenerate the new nation.

Carnival ambivalence, revolution and the third space

My analysis of the chronotopes in The Beautyful Ones highlighted the repetitiveness of time and the cyclical synchronicity rather than movement into the future. The social circularity is merged with another circularity, which has to do with nature or the universe. This lack of movement into diachronic time seems to make permanent the deferral of any massive change. However, Lazarus (1990) notes that the brave new world of the beautyful ones is implicit in the degradation of the real world in which the man lives. Lazarus argues that the social environment of the man is profoundly unrevolutionary but the spectre of revolution figures in the margin all the same. Even though Ghana in The Beautyful Ones is an independent country, indications are that it is still under colonial control and is in need of liberation. A history of cyclical and repetitive domination has served to severely polarise the nation with vertical gaps growing frighteningly deeper. Armah, however, does not merely indicate the necessity of revolution; his symbolism makes revolution look like the imminent natural process. Armahs narrative historicises the revolutionary struggle as having started with the agitation for independence. Revolution is with the masses. As Fanon noted, the cultural and political struggle can be located in the zone of occult instability where the people dwell (quoted in Perloff, 1998). Bakhtin (1984) explains that it is the carnival of the people that works to disrupt the monologic, tradition bound authority of the ruling classes. Therefore the terms revolution and carnival may be used interchangeably. They are both sourced from the same social sites and have the same effects of demolishing the vertical structures that entrench social differentiation. Carnival becomes imminent with the mobilisation of the people. But in The Beautyful Ones the independence struggle was led by the nationalist elite who were unable to win the support of the masses because those men appeared at the carnival square of the political rally

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putting a vertical gap between themselves and the people. They seemed to the people not very much unlike the white oppressors,

Men who have risen to lead the hungry came in clothes they might have been hoping to use at the Governors Ball on the birth-day of the white peoples queen, carrying cuff links that shone insultingly in the faces of men who have stolen pennies from their friends (p.81).

The nationalists look very much like what Bhabha (1990) refers to as the mimic men of colonialism. Having undergone the English colonial education, they are Africans only in blood and colour, but are English in taste, manners, attitude and intellect. Bhabha, like many culturalists, has shifted interest from fixed binaries of traditional/modern, colonist/coloniser, black/white, oppressor/oppressed. He proposes a theory of the Third Space, which explores the in-between spaces of those binaries. According to Bhabha, it is at the faultlines on the boundary situations and threshold sites that identities are performed and contested. In The Beautyful Ones the nationalist elite may be parsed as inhabiting the faultlines between the colonialist English and the colonised African. Born African, they can speak in the accent of the English gentleman. In Bhabhas terminology, they will be referred to as almost English, but not quite. Bhabha has claimed that forms of popular rebellion and mobilisation are often most subversive and transgressive when they are created through oppositional cultural practices. But Armahs nationalist hybrids were unable to mobilise the masses for any contestation. They had no idea of and interest in the needs and aspirations of the masses and the brutality in their quest for power is revealed in the wanton exploitation of the masses carnival drinking of akpeteshie to wrestle power from the colonial authorities. The project of the nationalist elite was to demonstrate how unlike the apketeshie drinking underclasses they were and how much English they seemed. The nationalist elite failed because they lacked popular legitimacy: the horizontalising features that should link them with the masses. Being part of the bourgeoisie, those lawyers tried to differentiate themselves from the collectivity of the people (see Wills, 1989). They were part of the dominant bloc that conspired with the colonial regime to oppress the people, and their gestures during the independence struggle were merely to deny their complicity to hegemony. As Lucas (2000) would say,

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the third space of the nationalist elite was not simply a hybrid space between disparate groups and the ruling class. It was a third space between oppositional power blocs.

The pain in the cyclical nature of domination and oppression is that Kwame Nkrumah, who captured the popular space of the independence struggle, unlike the nationalist elite, affiliated himself with the people. The fact that he was an educated elite did not prevent him from entering into horizontal links with the underclass. He, unlike the other agitators, was not born into power or riches and therefore had never being in league with the colonial oppressors. He was not ashamed of his poverty; in fact he exploited it as a strength and used it to link himself with the people. It was for this reason that Maanan and the others recognised their thoughts in his voice. At the carnival space of the political rally, Nkrumah declared his incompleteness and dependence upon the people,

Alone, I am nothing. I have nothing. We have power. But we will never know it; we will never see it work. Unless we choose to come together (p.87).

Teacher saw this to be what held the promise of beautiful things. It was this that made the revolution look imminent. Teacher calls it the waking of the powerless (p.85). Lazarus (1990) notes thatIn The Beautyful Ones the authenticity of Nkrumahs public stance in the decolonizing years is repeatedly emphasised. His campaign speeches are described as reflecting his private passions, and their felicity is seen to have rested in the fact that they tapped exactly the mood of the masses.

But that was not all; Nkrumah recruited his revolutionary cadres from the ranks of the ordinary people, the verandah boys, like Koomson, a dock worker, callused, haughty and raucous. It is for this reason that the betrayal of the revolution inflicted such cosmic pain on the people. In the words of Lazarus

Nkrumah and his party have taken Ghana through a full circle: from hardship and disaffection, through promise and even beginning of real change to hardship and disaffection once more.

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The Nkrumaists, once in power, began to erect vertical barriers between themselves and the people by taking on more and more a semblance of the nationalist leaders in their rapacity and affiliation with the colonial authorities. Nkrumah himself relinquished his revolutionary affiliation with the poor and moved into the luxury of the old slave castle. His minions then got obsessed with nothing but opprobrious acquisitiveness in the pursuit of the gleam.

The image of the gleam combines within itself all that is alien to the African in the life of the white colonists, and corruption inherent in material aggrandisement. The gleam therefore is an image of entropy and counter to revolution. The gleam is so compelling that it dominates the lives of all the characters in the novel and represents the hegemony of the ruling classes. If Ghana in the novel is a neo-colonial country it is because the people have abandoned themselves to the univocal discourse of the gleam. The gleams opposition to revolution is that it forces even the masses to assume that history has indeed materialised and that the gleam has become the site enunciating their aspirations. It is for this reason that the mans wife, Oyo, thinks life is unbearable for her because she lacks the good things of the gleam. Also the gleam has the effect of dissolving what Young refers to as a social group into a social seriality (see Lucas, 2000), prevented from group agency by various antagonisms. It is only in this light that the hostility of Oyos mother towards the man makes sense. The gleam dissolves the horizontal structures of revolution and replaces them with vertical structures which entrench hegemony. It is for this reason that Koomson can no longer come to his former colleagues, neither can he join them in their carnival liberties of smoking wee and heaping abuse on ignorant judges.

Perhaps the most telling effect of the gleam is its ability to persuade people who in the past merged their aspirations with the independence struggle, that revolution is impossible. That is the reason for Teachers despair. But the discursive space of the gleam is characterised by ambivalence and an individuals orientation to revolution depends on whether their own response to the gleam is monologic or dialogic. Teachers response to the gleam is monologic. He takes the option of unremitting flight. The horrors

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of the dissipation of national hope and life drive him to the margins of life. Teacher cuts himself from human contact, does not marry nor go back to his family. He has nothing but contempt for the gleam and those enamoured by its glitter. In his mind the binary distinctions between the gleam and the promise of revolution are clear. The people have become devoted to the gleam and the revolution is forfeit. The paradox in Teachers position is that even though he frees himself entirely from the enslavement of the gleam, there is nothing he can do with that freedom. That is why he tells the man,You see, I am free to do what I want, but there is nothing happening that I want to join. There used to be something, and you know what I mean (p.61) .

What Teacher urges is withdrawal; withdrawal from the people devoted to darkness instead of the beauty of light. In the context of gratuitous consumption that has occupied the entire nation, Teachers response is to keep quiet and not get close to people (p.93). Teachers decision is a univocal engagement with despair. He sinks an unbridgeable gulf between words and action. The Nkrumaist betrayal of revolution has dissipated entirely his verve for action and he is only left with words. Teachers position amounts to a separation of theory from politics, which indeed is an abandonment of revolution.

The man, unlike Teacher, recognises a possibility of avoiding a conflation of the gleam with the means of getting to the gleam. According to him, the gleam itself could be a good thing. That is why he does not blame his wife and children for desiring for themselves the things of the gleam. But the man does not simply neutralise the gleam as something harmless in itself; its enslaving potential is all too clear to him, and yet its attraction to him is very strong; for he cannot look at those beautiful things and feel contempt for them. What rather brings him greater confusion is the way to achieve those things of beauty. The position the man takes in relation to the gleam and those who are devoted to the gleam is always shifting; it is a flux. There seems to be several contrasting voices simultaneously struggling for control within the man. At one time he is disgusted by corruption, at another there is no blame in his mind for those who have tried the rotten ways and found them to be full of sweetness (p.145). Corruption itself becomes ambivalent for him. He holds in his soul deep repugnance for its rottenness, and yet at the

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same time realises it is the way of all flesh and that it will be unnatural not to yield to the process of decay. Even though the man persists in his struggle against corruption he is not entirely free of the contamination of its imperatives. Etsy (1999) identifies the man as the one who voices Armahs own doubts about the self exempting intellectual in a disintegrating and corrupt society. While the man indeed is full of doubt about his place in this entropic environment, my analysis will rather support the attribution of the self exempting intellectual to the mans friend and mentor, Teacher. As the man comes to recognise, only Teacher talks in a way that parted everything so clearly into light and shadow, the great beautiful things that could be and the stark ugly things that are (p.79) The man cannot maintain the binaries Teacher keeps apart and in his thoughts darkness twin with the light (ibid). The mans attitude towards corruption and to the gleam lacks closure, and, as Lucas (2000) would say, he holds within himself his opposite. The mans resistance against the gleam is also a resistance against fixed positions. He is the true hybrid figure that Bhabha (1990) talks about - embodying the flux, non-fixity and ambivalence that provokes change. The man in practical terms is a liminal figure bestriding the social space between the elite and the underclass. It should be noted that as a morse controller he is somewhere at the middle ranks of the railway hierarchy. In fact there are some workers who address him sah and massa, forms of deference the man would rather they did not use in reference to him. Also, in spite of the squalor in the mans home, he does not, like Koomsons boatman, live in a converted lavatory. There are indeed some worse off than the man, and that is also part of his anguish. The stairway and the banister are exact representations of the man. The pain of the mans life is also that from the space he occupies; it seems the luxury of the life associated with the elite is within grasp. Life however does not fail to be an unremitting struggle with despair. But the man, unlike Teacher does not live an empty life filled only with words. The difficulty of his life, most of all, has to do with the ability to keep the gleam in view without getting contaminated with its attendant filth.

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Achebe (1975) observed the mans introspection and criticised Armah for his protagonists passivity. Etsy (1999) argues that the man cannot quite come to his own as a figure of political resistance because he remains a tragically inert principle of ethical nonalignment. According the Etsy, the mans reconsolidated selfhood cannot serve as the basis for a dialectical or historical transformation. Etsy goes on that a narrative that explores an individuals existential suffering cannot suddenly convert itself into an allegory of political hope. My analysis has, however, shown that it is Teacher, rather than the man, who adopts the principle of ethical non-alignment. The man does not insulate himself from the environment; neither does he isolate himself from the struggle. His life is a struggle between despair and hope, words and action. He tells Teacher,

You know it is impossible for me to watch these things and say nothing. I have my family. I am in the middle (p.93).

Additionally, as Bhabha (1994) says, resistance is not necessarily an oppositional act of political intention. The mans resistance is the recognition of the ambivalence of the dominating discourses that affect his life: the awakening of the powerless and the call of the gleam. It is this recognition that allows the man not to enter into any simplistic commitment to despair, and to keep the option of hope open. It is for this reason that the man can believe that the beautiful ones will be born even if the convergence of space with time will be deferred until after his lease of life had ended. Juvan (1999) notes that Bakhtins connection with post structuralism is partially through his anti-systemic linguism, defending a relational, interactive and inconclusive historical conception of truth. His preference is for the subject which does not possess a stable identity but rather has various types of semiotically represented consciousness interacting and coexisting in it. For this reason a Bakhtinian reading of The Beautyful Ones will accept the mans shifting and flux position as the truth preferred in the novel instead of Teachers steady embrace with despair, even though he enunciates it with clarity and conviction.

Conclusion

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The focus of this paper has been to demonstrate that Bakhtins theory of the carnival allows a reading of Armahs The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born as not merely a monologic engagement with despair. My analysis has acknowledged the entropy of the novels physical environment and has dealt with the deferral of hope that pervades the entire novel. Even though Bakhtins theory of the chronotope makes clear the vertical structures that entrench social differentiation, the carnival idea restores a balance by explicating the social functions of Armahs scatological imagery. The main point here is that regeneration or birth is imminent in the processes of decay and death. The mans heroism in his resistance to the gleam is in his dialogic engagement with its enunciations. Carnival energy is in its ambivalence and shifting positions. It is at this site that the man explores an inner potential against the hegemony of the gleam and despair.

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