a weak utopianism of postcolonial nationalist bildung: re-reading ayi kwei armah’s ...
TRANSCRIPT
This article was downloaded by: [Nipissing University]On: 04 October 2014, At: 09:51Publisher: RoutledgeInforma Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registeredoffice: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK
Journal of Postcolonial WritingPublication details, including instructions for authors andsubscription information:http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rjpw20
A weak utopianism of postcolonialnationalist Bildung: Re-reading AyiKwei Armah’s The Beautyful Ones AreNot Yet BornHugh Charles O’Connell aa Valdosta State University , USAPublished online: 07 Jul 2011.
To cite this article: Hugh Charles O’Connell (2012) A weak utopianism of postcolonial nationalistBildung: Re-reading Ayi Kwei Armah’s The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born , Journal of PostcolonialWriting, 48:4, 371-383, DOI: 10.1080/17449855.2011.574855
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17449855.2011.574855
PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE
Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all the information (the“Content”) contained in the publications on our platform. However, Taylor & Francis,our agents, and our licensors make no representations or warranties whatsoever as tothe accuracy, completeness, or suitability for any purpose of the Content. Any opinionsand views expressed in this publication are the opinions and views of the authors,and are not the views of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis. The accuracy of the Contentshould not be relied upon and should be independently verified with primary sourcesof information. Taylor and Francis shall not be liable for any losses, actions, claims,proceedings, demands, costs, expenses, damages, and other liabilities whatsoever orhowsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with, in relation to or arisingout of the use of the Content.
This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Anysubstantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-licensing,systematic supply, or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. Terms &Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and-conditions
A weak utopianism of postcolonial nationalist Bildung: Re-readingAyi Kwei Armah’s The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born
Hugh Charles O’Connell*
Valdosta State University, USA
Most criticism of Ayi Kwei Armah’s 1968 novel The Beautyful Ones Are NotYet Born has concentrated on the pessimistic aspects of the text, highlighting thefailures of postcolonial nationalist movements, and ranking Armah’s work“among the bleakest and most disenabling texts to be produced during the firstdecade of independence in Africa” (Lazarus, “(Re)turn to the People” in TheWorld of Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, ed. Charles Cantalupo [Trenton, NJ: AfricanWorld, 1995]). This article contests such readings and works towards therecovery of a latent, weak utopianism that works similarly to Derrida’sconception of messianicity without messianism and the promise for the eventyet to-come. Instead of viewing the novel as an historical account of the failuresof postcolonial nationalism, this weak-utopian reading privileges the promiseand possibility that arise from the text itself. Thus the article underscores theneed for a negative dialectical or weak-utopian politics, recognizing, inAdorno’s words, the “consciousness of non-identity, or, more accurately [ ::: ],the creation of a reconciled non-identity” (55).
Keywords: Ayi Kwei Armah; postcolonial nationalism; utopianism; messianicitywithout messianism; postcolonial Bildung; negative dialectics
In a recent article on the notion of “failed” postcolonial states, Peter Hitchcockoffers the following provocative statement: “I am more interested in the politicalpossibilities of disastrous statehood [ ::: ] than [in] the consummate ease with whichan aspiring and/or flailing hegemon writes off whole chunks of human communityaround the world” (729). In a related fashion, this article explores the weakly uto-pian possibilities that arise from a negative dialectical reading of nationalism. Thatis, it is my contention that such a reading reveals the weak-utopian nationalism thatunderscores the postcolonial literature accompanying failed post-independencenationalist movements in the wake of decolonization. As an interpretative and meth-odological apparatus, negative dialectics, here, serves as a means to critique thereifying and reductive aspects of nationalist discourse, while privileging the open-ness and possibility of what Adorno theorizes as non-identity as a mode of recogni-tion and articulation. Given these concerns, I return to what is often thought of asan earlier moment in postcolonial literary studies via an emphasis on the nation-building text, or what Pheng Cheah refers to throughout the latter half of his
*Email: [email protected]
Journal of Postcolonial WritingVol. 48, No. 4, September 2012, 371–383
ISSN 1744-9855 print/ISSN 1744-9863 online� 2012 Taylor & Francishttp://dx.doi.org/10.1080/17449855.2011.574855http://www.tandfonline.com
Dow
nloa
ded
by [
Nip
issi
ng U
nive
rsity
] at
09:
51 0
4 O
ctob
er 2
014
Spectral Nationality as “the national Bildung”, in order to rethink the role of thepostcolonial Bildungsroman in terms that focus not on the nation or state that is buton the possibility of those to-come. This shift in focus allows one to challenge thecanonical narrative of anti-colonial nationalism, which posits a frenzy of Utopiannation-building texts in the 1960s that eventually turn dyspeptic and critical due tothe failure of postcolonial states in the 1970s. It is this teleological trajectory thatprovides the impetus for much of the contemporary emphasis on ironic and ambiva-lent diasporic texts that privilege postnational, indeed global, identities as being theonly historically and politically available figure for postcolonial and postimperialsubjectivity in the wake of failed states and failed nationalisms. Throughout thisarticle, then, I distinguish between: (1) Utopianism as the definitive project thatcalls forth the full presence of Utopia as the end of difference and the end of his-tory, and (2) utopianism as a “weak utopianism” that privileges moments of possi-bility and futurity that are neither bound to the conditions of the present nor thefully redemptive aspects of the eschaton. The gambit here is that if nationalism hasoften been understood as a western-derived Utopian discourse in terms of the fullpresence of the nation and its immanent nation-peoples, then Ghanaian author AyiKwei Armah’s 1968 novel The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born provides not onlya critique of this from the postcolonial position but also an impetus for rethinkingthe concept of nationalism from a weak-utopian point of view. Indeed, a re-readingof The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born allows a postcolonial intervention into thetheories of utopianism and democracy to-come that are otherwise often predicatedon western ideologies and contexts. The following discussion of this novel suggeststhe residual weak-utopian impulse inextinguishable in even the most pessimisticaccounts of the failures of anti-colonial nationalism. I then use this reading of thenovel to enter into the theoretical debates surrounding utopianism, globalization anddemocracy to-come from a weak-utopian postcolonial nationalist position. On theone hand this re-reading calls for a renewed commitment to the particular problemsand legacies of postcolonial nationalism, while on the other it proffers new avenuesfor postcolonial interventions in the present.
Briefly, Armah’s novel concerns an unnamed Ghanaian man who works as aclerk for the national railroad, post-independence. The principal conflict in the novelrevolves around his refusal to take a bribe. By refusing the bribe, he puts himself atodds with the widespread corruption that marks the postcolonial state of Ghana,and this further marks him as out of step with the rampant kleptocratic principles ofthe nation-state. The deliberate atmosphere of alienation from the national structureof feeling is further highlighted by his anonymity, which constantly situates him asbeing adrift from contemporary Ghana. Moreover, this simple act of refusal placeshim at odds with his wife and family. From his wife’s vantage point, he is seen asfailing to take advantage of the opportunities presented to him to do everything hecan to make money and climb ahead, unlike his friend Koomson, who has cheatedhis way into an influential position in Nkrumah’s government, from where he stealsfrom the Ghanaian people under the purported guise of nationalization. As thenovel comes to a head, the Nkrumah regime is overthrown in a coup and theunnamed narrator must help his former friend escape capture by the new regime.
Armah’s novel is often taken as a paradigmatic example of the ambivalencetowards nationalism or even its rejection as a failed project post-independence dueto the corruption of the state by the neocolonial nationalist bourgeoisie. Indeed,even such a proponent of anti-colonial and postcolonial nationalitarianism as Neil
372 H.C. O’Connell
Dow
nloa
ded
by [
Nip
issi
ng U
nive
rsity
] at
09:
51 0
4 O
ctob
er 2
014
Lazarus states that he reads Armah’s novel as just the sort of text that illustratesSpivak’s dictum about Mahasweta Devi’s “Douloti the Bountiful” as “a story that‘invites [the reader] to realize that ::: “Empire” and “Nation” are interchangeablenames, however hard it might be ::: to imagine it’” (“Disavowing” 71).1 We canlocate the foundations of this sort of anti-nationalist sentiment early on in the novelin a beautifully wrought description of a banister, that closes the first chapter.
In this passage, the unnamed protagonist is heading to work at the “Railwayand Harbour Administration Block”. By placing him in the employ of the nationaltrain company, Armah highlights the connection between the railway as the overde-termined signifier of colonial conquest and its continuing resonance as a symbol ofthe reconquest of the postcolonial nation-state by the nationalist bourgeoisie whouse the rhetoric of nationalism and nationalization as a mere means of neocolonialcontrol. In the passage in question, as the narrator is walking up the stairs, Armahwrites:
By its light it was barely possible to see the banister, and the sight was like that of avery long piece of diseased skin. The banister had originally been a wooden one, andto this time it was still possible to see, in the deepest of the cracks between the swell-ings of other matter, a dubious piece of deeply aged brown wood. They were nolonger sharp, the cracks, but all rounded out and smoothed, consumed by some soft,gentle process of decay. In places the wood seemed to have been painted over, butthat must have been long ago indeed. [ ::: ] What had been going on there and wasgoing on now and would go on and on through all the years ahead was a species ofwar carried on in the silence of long ages, a struggle in which only the keen, uncannyeyes and ears of lunatic seers could detect the deceiving, easy breathing of the strug-glers. (12)
He adds to this already despairing description that:
The wood underneath would win and win till the end of time. Of that there was nodoubt possible, only the pain of hope perennially doomed to disappointment. [ ::: ]The polish, it was supposed, would catch the rot. But of course in the end it was therot which imprisoned everything in its effortless embrace. (12)
He then briefly shifts the emphasis from the rotting wood to the rotting humanhands that attend to the wood and eventually concludes the chapter with the asser-tion that “The wood would always win” (13).
We can read the banister here as the allegorical figuration of the colonial turnedpostcolonial nation-state; although it has been painted over, the colonial legacypierces through the cracks and reveals itself as the dominant inheritance of thepostcolonial nation. The emblematic expression of colonial and neocolonialdiscourse is apparent through the constant recourse to tropes of consumption thatunderwrite this process of decay as it proceeds from the decrepit institutions of thestate through to the nation itself in the figure of the rotting hands belonging to thosewho attend to and are ensnared by the state. Moreover, there is a seeming accep-tance of permanence, of the inevitable and inexorable processes of colonialism-cum-neo-imperialism, which can no longer be proffered as a state of decline, or astate of imprisonment to be overcome (i.e. temporal and transient conditions);instead, as a state of permanence, it is presented as the ontological state of Beingthat is the postcolonial state itself. This sense of endless struggle captured in theappearance of the banister – “What had been going on there and was going on now
Journal of Postcolonial Writing 373
Dow
nloa
ded
by [
Nip
issi
ng U
nive
rsity
] at
09:
51 0
4 O
ctob
er 2
014
and would go on and on through all the years ahead” – evokes Pheng Cheah’sproblem of the haunting of the state by the seemingly ineradicable traces ofimperialism and ultimately comes to stand for the impossibility of transcendingwhat Hardt and Negri theorize as the inherently oppressive nature of the nation-statethrough anti-imperial or subaltern nationalist struggle. Instead of nationalism trans-forming the oppressive bourgeois colonial state, “the rot” of the state imprisons thenationalist movement in its “effortless embrace” in which “the wood would alwayswin”.
The mood of this early passage in the novel is juxtaposed with passages towardsthe middle that provide flashbacks to the euphoric moments of the burgeoning anti-colonial nationalist movement. The latter are marked by adolescent longing, bothsexual and social, and the smoking of wee (marijuana). These desires for freedomof the body, of the mind and of the people are intermixed with and enervated bythe early speeches by Nkrumah, who, we learn, is not just another “new old lawyerwanting to be white” but is instead authentically “young” and “new” (84). It isthese passions – those of Nkrumah and his followers – that we are meant to read ashaving already been engulfed and smothered by the rot of the wood. Although thelatter passage of youthful idealism chronologically precedes the scene of thenarrator walking up the stairs, by its very positioning later in the textual narrative,it signifies the ephemeral quality and ultimate demise of this anti-colonial fervor:the “young” has indeed turned old and the “new” is just more of the same. Thestructure of the narrative disallows any identification with this anti-colonial opti-mism by foregrounding the dismay that precedes it in the narrative construction andimplementation.
This pessimism is then redoubled at the end of the novel, by which time therehas been a coup resulting in the overthrow of Nkrumah’s government by a newregime. Armah, through his protagonist, distinguishes the coup by its lack of effecton the lives of the ordinary people of the nation: “there would only be a change ofembezzlers and a change of the hunters and hunted” (162), with the hunters in thiscontext being the new political elite hunting down and disposing of the previousregime’s members. The nationalist zeal that once accompanied Nkrumah’s over-throwing of the colonial state power has been reduced in the minds of the peopleto:
A pitiful shrinking of the world from [ ::: ] when the single mind was filled with thehopes of a whole people [ ::: ], to days when all the powerful could think of was touse the power of a whole people to fill their own paunches. (162)
What seems immediately apparent in this presentation is what Fredric Jameson hasreferred to in a different context as the structural weakening of the Marcusianutopian impulse in contemporary cultural production.2 The seemingly ironcladmechanisms of the contemporary systems of power suture the individual/artwork/artist into a position where only the inherent inevitability and inescapability of thesevery systems of power seem possible. The idea of possibility or difference of anykind seems immanently foreclosed by this neo-imperial Weltanschauung as totalsystem. The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born exemplifies this by immediatelyfollowing the passage quoted above with the laconic pronouncement of the “End-less days, same days, stretching into the future with no end anywhere in sight”(162). Taken in its entirety, the description of the lack of eventfulness that
374 H.C. O’Connell
Dow
nloa
ded
by [
Nip
issi
ng U
nive
rsity
] at
09:
51 0
4 O
ctob
er 2
014
characterizes the coup contains more than a passing resemblance to the prior pas-sage concerning the banister: “the wood would always win”.
However, what is perhaps most striking about this novel is its refusal to with-draw entirely from life and possibility, to accept the limitations of the postcolonialstate as inherent or inevitable, or finally to allow the “rot” of the state to fully“imprison” the nation as personified by the anonymous protagonist. Indeed, thepersistent questioning of the seemingly inevitable teleology of the oppression/strug-gle/freedom/oppression narrative of postcolonial nationalism destabilizes the verynaturalization of this narrative, by instead highlighting the particular contingenciesand historical effects of imperialism and neo-imperialism that produce it. That is,the very ideology of this narrative of the oppressive nature of postcolonial national-ism, in the deepest Gramscian understanding of ideology as common sense(Gramsci 321ff.), is adamantly challenged by an (admittedly) fleeting hope and opti-mism. This ephemeral quality of hope that pervades the text provides the substanceof what I term a weak-utopian impulse3 – a weak utopianism in that it represents adesire for difference that is not immediately calculable, definitive nor eschatologicalin the fullest sense, as are the traditional ideals of Utopianism.
We can track the persistence of this weak-utopian impulse more fully by exam-ining the protagonist’s initial reaction to the coup. After first hearing about it, hethinks that: “He would like to know about it, but there would be plenty of time forit, and he was not burdened with any hopes that new things, really new things,were as yet ready to come out” (159). Already we can see the play of ambivalencebetween the lack of “new things” of the present moment and the submerged hopeindicated by the doggedly insistent, “were as yet”. This most reluctant andrepressed optimism is compounded by the following statement:
Someday in the long future a new life would maybe flower in the country, but when itcame, it would not choose as its instruments the same people who had made a habitof killing new flowers. The future goodness may come eventually, but before thenwhere were the things in the present which would prepare the way for it? (159–60)
While the passage ends on the negative assessment cited above – “Endless days,same days, stretching into the future with no end anywhere in sight” – it also illus-trates the continuing weak-utopian impulse that the novel cannot fully circumscribe,even though it starts off by attempting to do so with the banister scene.
The parameters of this weak-utopian impulse can be even more fully grasped bythe resolutions that the novel provides for the protagonist’s internal conflictconcerning the untaken bribe, as well as by the concluding passage from which thenovel receives its name. When taken together, these two passages continue theoscillation between pessimism and optimism, similar to that of Gramsci’s famousphrase “pessimism of the intellect, optimism of will” often quoted by Edward Said.On returning home amidst the chaos of the coup, Oyo, the protagonist’s wife, whis-pers to him, “‘I am glad that you never became like him [Koomson]’” (165). Forthe protagonist, the act of not taking the bribe earlier in the text separates him fromthe corruption of the state and the cooptation of the nationalist movement and there-fore reconnects him to the earlier dreams of freedom. However, this refusal to takethe bribe had also estranged him from his family as he refused to take part in thepostcolonial grab for wealth and power like his childhood friend, Koomson. It isonly now that the corrupt regime is falling and Koomson needs his help in escaping
Journal of Postcolonial Writing 375
Dow
nloa
ded
by [
Nip
issi
ng U
nive
rsity
] at
09:
51 0
4 O
ctob
er 2
014
that he is reconciled with his wife and family. Consequently, he feels that “In Oyo’seyes there was now real gratitude. Perhaps for the first time in their married life theman could believe that she was glad to have him the way he was” (165). Signifi-cantly, this passage realigns the values of the family with those of the protagonistand the earlier hopes for the post-independence nation. This reunification providesfor a counter-national structure of feeling with which to rival the contemporarymoment, and as such it is housed not in the state apparatus but instead in “thepeople” as figured by the (problematic) term of the family, which serves, then, as asynecdoche of the nation.
Furthermore, the passage that closes the novel, which echoes the above sectiondescribing the protagonist’s initial reaction to the coup, connects the resolution ofthe protagonist’s personal conflict with the possibility of a future Ghanaian nationthat is more in tune with the earlier anti-colonial desires for independence. Afterwitnessing a policeman demand a bribe from a bus driver, exemplifying the lack ofchange wrought by the coup on the everyday life of the nation, the protagonistnotices a piece of street art: “the green paint was brightened with an inscriptioncarefully lettered to form an oval shape: The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born. Inthe center of the oval was a single flower, solitary unexplainable and very beautiful”(183). The image stays with him, lifting his mood after it had been darkened by thepolitical futility of the coup. Even as his mind shifts to the more quotidian andspirit-dampening – “Oyo, the eyes of the children after six o’clock, the office andevery day, and above all the never-ending knowledge that this aching emptinesswould be all that the remainder of his life could offer him” (183) – the problemssurrounding his work and home life have been resolved and the corruption thattaints the postcolonial state has not marked him. So finally, as readers, we are leftwith “the future goodness that may eventually come” and the suggestion that the“things in the present which [could] prepare the way for it” as still existing in theeveryday life of the people of Ghana, with the people represented, then, by theanonymous protagonist and unseen figure that painted the art work. Thus the resolu-tion of the novel holds out the promise of a residual, yet weakened, utopian impulseundergirding the possibilities for a future Ghanaian nation-state in this perpetuallypessimistic novel.
Pheng Cheah argues that The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born is one of thosepostcolonial texts “marked by despair or at least a greater awareness of the vicissi-tudes of the protagonist’s Bildung, which often ends tragically. Yet, they remainnovels of nationalist Bildung, where their protagonists’ lives parallel the history oftheir respective nations” (240). Instead of the allegorical identification between theprotagonist and the nation-state, it seems more feasible that it is precisely the alien-ation of the protagonist from the neo-imperial nation-state and his negation of theprevailing bourgeois nationalist sentiment that marks this text as an example ofanti-imperial nationalist Bildung. In as much as the protagonist’s life does not“parallel the history” of his “respective nation” as he is neither the hunter nor thehunted, he is instead alternately identified with both the “ones” and the nation thathave yet to be born. Hence, while agreeing that the text is an example of nationalistBildung, I would disagree about the nation-state under development. While Cheahviews the protagonist as an allegorical representation of the existing Ghanaiannation-state, it may be more profitable to see him as the harbinger of its death andas the possibility of something other to come in its place – something, that, like thenarrator, cannot be named by the text.
376 H.C. O’Connell
Dow
nloa
ded
by [
Nip
issi
ng U
nive
rsity
] at
09:
51 0
4 O
ctob
er 2
014
Such an interpretation of The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born gesturestowards the larger question: how do we characterize this weak-utopian impulse interms of the postcolonial nationalist Bildung in general? First, we must note thefamily resemblance of this weak utopianism to Benjamin’s “weak messianism”.The necessity of a revised and recontextualized weak messianism as an intrinsiccomponent for any contemporary politics of difference has been most powerfullyexpressed by Jacques Derrida in Specters of Marx (210–15) and the related essayreplying to his interlocutors, “Marx and Sons”. Replying to Fredric Jameson’sreading of “messianicity without messianism” as an essentially utopian principle,Derrida replies:
Messianicity [ ::: ] is anything but Utopian: it refers, in every here-now, to the comingof an eminently real, concrete event, that is, to the most irreducibly heterogeneous oth-erness. Nothing is more “realistic” or “immediate” than this messianistic apprehension,straining forward toward the event of him who/that which is coming. I say “apprehen-sion”, because this experience, strained forward toward the event, is at the same timea waiting without expectation [ ::: ] (an active preparation, anticipation against thebackdrop of a horizon, but also exposure without horizon, and therefore an irreducibleamalgam of desire and anguish, affirmation and fear, promise and threat). (“Marx”248–49)
What principally seems to separate “messianicity without messianism” from theUtopian for Derrida, then, is first of all its lack of program. For Derrida, this ismarked by the anguish and despair over the unknowability of that which is to-comeand the lack of any teleological necessity governing the flow of history or politicsor the calculability of the results of any decision to act. As he states more clearly inSpecters, “without this latter despair and if one could count on what is coming,hope would be but the calculation of a program” (212). The lack of program allowsone an indefinable and indefensible openness to that which is utterly different asthe incalculability of the future stands against the calculability of teleologies of anykind. That is to say, no political program that plans its final goals from the outset –which sees the full presence of the future here and now in the present – can everperform a radical break from that present; with such a program, difference is deniedas such. What is “weak”, then, is the sense of religious dogmatic certainty or politi-cal doxa.
The second principal difference can be identified through the negative character-istics invoked by the “anguish”, “fear” and “threat” which are coterminous withand inseparable from the “desire”, “affirmation” and “promise”. To be sure, theseconceptual pairs form no mere dichotomy, nor binary privileging schematic; insteadthey cohere, incommensurable, as the condition of possibility itself, and thereforewithout recourse to one side canceling out the other. We can infer from the abovepassage that Derrida sees these latter positive attributes as being the only effective,as well as affective, aspects of Utopia. However, it is difficult to imagine any con-temporary Utopianism that has not been met with anguish or fear. Indeed, it is inthis sense that dystopia is the flipside of the same coin as utopianism and not itsformal or epistemological opposite in the sense of an anti-utopia, an argumentwhich Tom Moylan drives home so pointedly in his Scraps of the Untainted Sky.Moreover, given the far-ranging critiques of utopian thought on both the left andright that equate Utopianism with absolutism and hostility to difference and whichlocate the ultimate practical horizon of Utopianist ideals in the outcomes of Stalin’s
Journal of Postcolonial Writing 377
Dow
nloa
ded
by [
Nip
issi
ng U
nive
rsity
] at
09:
51 0
4 O
ctob
er 2
014
gulags and Hitler’s concentration camps, Utopianism has often been seen as wield-ing a very real threat within its idealist promise.
In light of these concerns, much contemporary work on the utopian has indeedshunned the concept of Utopia as a realizable endpoint or totalizable project infavor of the utopian as a desire for difference. Instead, utopia can be thought as apoint of departure that directs one’s consciousness towards a sense of futurity thatruns counter to neoliberal pronouncements of the end of history. Here, then, iswhere a recontextualization of Derrida’s statement that “Anything but Utopian,messianicity mandates that we interrupt the ordinary course of things, time andhistory here-now; it is inseparable from an affirmation of otherness and justice”(249, emphasis in original) comes into contact with the sense of utopia as thatineluctable placeholder for that which is the not here and not now. Both representthe desire to act in the name of a radically different future, and as such both keepfaith with Derrida’s conclusion that “one could not so much as account for thepossibility of Utopia in general without reference to what I call messianicity” (249).However, I would wish to replace “Utopia in general” in the prior instance with“the utopian” which is always open to the possibility of difference and the impossi-bility of the end of ideology as such, in the Althusserian sense. Yet what is emi-nently clear from Derrida’s invocation of a New International and from his tenplagues, from Jameson’s writing on late capitalist globalization as well as fromArmah’s text, is that a different future is desirable but is not inevitable nor withoutrisk, and utopia serves as the placeholder for this difference.
At any rate, what is most important in this discussion of the utopian and its rela-tionship to messianicity in terms of a critique of postcolonial and postimperialnationalisms is the impossibility of closure, of the impossibility of the full presenceof the utopian in either the present or the future. Yet, alongside this recognition ofthe impossibility of closure, it is also equally important to retain Derrida’s demandfor a “promise and an injunction that call for commitment without delay” (“Marx”249). To be sure, it is the fully Utopian characteristics that Derrida seeks to distancehimself from, and it is these same Utopian characteristics that can be seen asafflicting Armah’s novel. In other words, we can juxtapose the so-called Utopianunderpinnings of the bourgeois postcolonial nationalists, which transformeddecolonizing nations through rhetorics of development and modernization intoneo-imperial states, with the weak utopianism outlined above. This is, perhaps, whyit becomes so easy to identify The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born, as well asother postcolonial texts, as ambivalent concerning nationalism and the nation-state,because most substantive accounts of the postcolonial nation handcuff them to theprevailing whims of history as located and aligned with the bourgeois nationalists.Such readings make nationalism constitutive of bourgeois nationalism and of a Uto-pian teleology of western capitalist modernization, and thus relegate anyundercurrents of what I am calling a weak utopianism to a mere further instantiationof the former. Or, as Neil Lazarus writes in a slightly different context, “Anticolo-nial nationalist discourse is disparaged for precisely the same reasons as metropoli-tan nationalist discourse, and for one additional and paramount reason besides: it isheld to amount to a replication, a reiteration, of the terms of colonial discourseitself” (“Disavowing” 71).
Moreover, identifying these texts squarely with the history of neo-imperial bour-geois nationalism marks the novels as little more than history texts that can onlygive voice to the construction and location of the present. Such purely historicist,
378 H.C. O’Connell
Dow
nloa
ded
by [
Nip
issi
ng U
nive
rsity
] at
09:
51 0
4 O
ctob
er 2
014
presentist readings render postcolonial novels inert, and, as Rey Chow asserts,“condemn ‘third world’ cultural production in the age of postmodernism to a kindof realism with functions of authenticity, didacticism, and deep meaning” (56). Con-sequently, what The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born gives voice to, in both itstitle and narrative, is the not-yet, to that which is other to the present and thusunknowable to the teleological, western developmental discourse of history wrappedin the promise of the bourgeois nationalists. In this sense, the weak utopianism ofthe novel registers a continuation of the anti-colonial, nationalist sentiment that hasyet to be fully extinguished although it has been transformed and continues to takeon new meanings.
Reading Armah’s novel through the register of the futuricity of utopianism andof the to-come also, in some respects, participates in rethinking the existentialistgroundings which have been seen as providing the novel’s deep structuralpessimism. Arguing for a parallel between the condition of post-Second World WarFrance and postcolonial Africa, Tommie L. Jackson maintains that both were thesites of a “crisis of values” that precipitated similar existential outlooks due to theirprotracted periods of “irrationality, immorality, and lawlessness” (14). Respondingto such a situation, Jackson continues, gives emphasis to absurdity in existentialistthought. Focusing on this shared experience of a crisis of values and absurdity,Jackson argues that the existentialist position that underwrites Camus’s The Myth ofSisyphus and The Stranger is modified to provide the philosophical grounding forThe Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born (18). She writes:
In Armah’s The Beautyful Ones, the same discrepancy and conflict which Camushas described as giving rise to the absurd prevail throughout the novel; however,where death is argued by Camus as the supreme menace which reduces man’shopes to nothingness, Armah uniquely interprets corruption as the nemesis whichnullifies man’s efforts, thus stripping him of any hopes of triumph. [ ::: ] Thecomplete inversion of social values which congratulates theft and condemns hon-esty as a social vice accounts then for the extraordinary amount of corruption inGhanaian society and, concomitantly, for the characters’ feelings of malaise and ofthe absurd. (19, 25)
However, Jackson reads Armah’s transformation of existentialist absurdism into theAfrican context as one that produces only “responses of tortured passivity and res-ignation” which are ultimately “at variance with the spirit of the absurd, at leastaccording to Camus” who “had rejected out of hand total despair” in favor ofrevolting against the pervasiveness of such meaninglessness (31). Ultimately shesees the weak sense of hope in Armah’s novel as “escapism”, adding that “the atti-tude of hope as adopted by Armah is the equivalent of philosophical evasion, sinceit violates the terms of the equation, unceasing struggle and confrontation, thusdestroying altogether the principle of the absurd” (34, 35).
Against this reading of the corruption of existentialist absurdism by despair and“escapism”, an emphasis on the weak utopianism of the novel allows for anotherexistentialist possibility, discernible here through the Sartrean categories of Being-for-others and Being-with-others. In terms of the former, the protagonist finds hissense of self impinged upon by his social surroundings in that his sense of self isconstantly mediated by how others see him and how he sees others. Yet he is notfully circumscribed by the others that surround him – neither by his family nor thecorruption of the politicians – and thus he is able to imagine or hope for the
Journal of Postcolonial Writing 379
Dow
nloa
ded
by [
Nip
issi
ng U
nive
rsity
] at
09:
51 0
4 O
ctob
er 2
014
existence of others like himself that also escape the embrace of the “rot” of thepostcolonial nation. It is because of this sense of his limited autonomy that thenovel provides, both through its title and its ending, a Being-for-others through thefigure of those beautyful ones not yet born. Yet the conditional temporality of the“not yet” removes this Being-for-others from the realm of the present and the inevi-tability of the teleologically historical to the realm of the to-come, thereby puttingthe protagonist in solidarity with their possibility. In this sense, it departs from soli-darity with actually existing others in Sartre’s sense of the Being-with-others, andgestures towards what Derrida refers to through messianism-without-messianicity:
[the] straining forward toward the event of him who/that which is coming [ ::: as the]active preparation, anticipation against the backdrop of a horizon, but also exposurewithout horizon, and therefore an irreducible amalgam of desire and anguish, affirma-tion and fear, promise and threat. (‘‘Marx and Sons” 248–49)
The turn to weak utopianism, then, undercuts the ontological position by privi-leging the other not as existent and concomitant with the narrator and of thesame socio-historical condition, but instead as an other yet to-come. Thereby, itis neither a fidelity to what is, nor what is assuredly to come through an opera-tion of identity, but instead a possibility that breaks with the strictures of teleol-ogy and history – a faith in and solidarity with the possibility of differenceitself.
However, there is another sense in which we must interrogate and ultimatelycritique the “weak” of this weakly utopian novel, which is attached principally toits individualism and isolation. As Jameson argues in The Political Unconscious,for utopianism to have any political efficacy it must provide for figures of collectiv-ity (which, following Adorno, I will insist is not the same as identity as the dialecti-cal sublation of difference). Gautam Premnath argues, in his work on “weaksovereignty”, that the nation-state remains a principal utopian site for politicalaction in the era of global late capitalism figured by multinational corporations, theWTO, GATT, the World Bank, and the IMF. As such, the nation retains a troubledfigure of collectivity against the fragmentation and depoliticization, often expressedas a waning of affect, of global late capitalist experience. Such a claim for theweak-utopian aspects of the nation as collectivity in the face of globalization cer-tainly stands against the tide of much contemporary political and cultural theoryfrom Hardt and Negri’s “multitudes”, to the positive aspects of cultural decenteringand entanglement furthered by the culturalist cosmopolitan theories of globalizationby Fredrick Buell or Kwame Anthony Appiah, to the formation of the non-hierar-chical, non-representative World Social Forum (WSF). However, as a number ofrecent critiques have illustrated, these positions are often complicit with the logic oflate capitalism and, furthermore, are in danger of supplying a neo-imperial late capi-talist universalism that runs roughshod over the concerns of the chronicallyunderdeveloped and politically less stable areas of the world-system. As MaliniJohar Schueller’s recent essay “Decolonizing Global Theories Today” avers, suchwell-meaning but ultimately western-derived discourses can inadvertently lead to, atworst, a global paternalism or, at best, ineffectuality. Here, then, the nation as thefigure of solidarity and a renewed sense of futurity confronts the neo-liberal “I” asa pseudo-empowered global consumer “free” to fashion oneself from the inexorableswirl of global products (while one’s rights to clean water are sold to Coca-Cola).
380 H.C. O’Connell
Dow
nloa
ded
by [
Nip
issi
ng U
nive
rsity
] at
09:
51 0
4 O
ctob
er 2
014
That is, it becomes the space for contestations over one’s locally and globallyderived rights – a position that has much in common with Fanon’s idea of aninternational nationalism, as well as a site for thinking through a politics inspiredby the incommensurability of negative dialectics.
The particular weaknesses of the Armah example, then, stem from the relianceon the figure of the individual.4 As Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o argues, “the writer in thisperiod [of the failures of postcolonial nationalism] often retreated into individual-ism, cynicism, or into empty moral appeals for a change of heart” (11). It could beargued that Armah’s text attempts to resolve this problem through the anonymity ofthe protagonist, and, indeed, one may wish to privilege this anonymity exactly forits emptying of the determinant content or full presence of the national figure. Thatis, Armah’s protagonist escapes the strictures of becoming the representativeembodiment of the postcolonial nationalist figure as the true agent of history.However, this lone, anonymous protagonist offers no figuration of collectivity.Instead, the promise of a future collectivity is prefigured by and thus reduced to therole of the protagonist. The emphasis on the lone protagonist allows for a solipsisticreading whereby his particular singularity becomes the pluralized “ones” of the titleand street art. This collapsing of the narrator and the future “ones” seems toperform an operation of identity that dialectically bonds and synthesizes the individ-ual’s consciousness to the (coming) nation. Although it is a removed nation tocome, it still performs the operation of a traditional Bildungsroman in this sense,and as such potentially undercuts the weak utopianism of the novel. Furthermore,there is no sense, really, of the global context of the neo-imperial world-systemfrom which to link the national struggle to international struggles, from anti-colonialnationalism to liberation in Edward Said’s terms (Said 210ff.). This is particularlystriking in the novel’s critique of nationalization as an internal neocolonial tool ofoppression by the nationalist bourgeoisie, through which the critiques of the nation-alist government become a critique of anti-colonial nationalism itself. The historyof colonialism, the realities of Cold War pressures of alignment and encroachingneocolonial economic development are absent from the text such that nationalismand corruption seem coterminous, immanent aspects of Ghana as a postcolonialnation-state itself. In that the novel desires to create a truly self-actualized nation ofimmanence and pure self-being, all problems and failures associated with thatproject are thus seen as internal, impure deformities in the process of identity, ofthe self qua nation. In this sense, the weakness of the utopian impulse is neitherstrategic nor progressive and instead more in line with that waning of the Marcusianutopian impulse as mentioned above.
By way of conclusion, this re-reading of a supposedly ambivalent or indeedpessimistic text concerning the possibilities and fulfillment of anti-colonial orpostcolonial nationalism reveals a residual, yet weakened, sense of the utopianimpulse. This weak utopianism provides new horizons and possibilities for rethink-ing and reinvigorating anti-imperial movements from a present standpoint, particu-larly in the privileging of the anonymity of the national collectivity and theopenness and incompletability of the nation. Moreover, it suggests the need for aninterruption in the forms of nationalist Bildung that seek a pure identity betweencitizen, nation and state. In his excellent Human Rights, INC, Joseph Slaughterasserts that the classical Bildungsroman creates a dialectical link between citizen/subject and the state. The dialectical link allows for a coeval development wherebythe identity between the citizen/subject and state is developed reflexively, thus
Journal of Postcolonial Writing 381
Dow
nloa
ded
by [
Nip
issi
ng U
nive
rsity
] at
09:
51 0
4 O
ctob
er 2
014
producing a reciprocal concept of identity which can be posited in terms of thedevelopment of the nation. By way of contrast, he then explores the way that theKenyan author Marjorie Oludhe Macgoye’s postcolonial Bildungsroman, Coming toBirth, presents an allegorical link between citizen/subject and the state that finds itsexpression in assimilation. Assimilation, in this context, molds the citizen/subject tothe state whereby in the postcolonial context “modernity’s statist structures all pre-exist Paulina and remain largely unaffected by her presence within them” (126). Iwant to close this reading by suggesting that The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Bornimplies the need for something different to both the dialectical and allegorical mod-els of Bildungsromane, which can be thought of as a negative dialectical Bildungs-roman where:
[ ::: ] an achieved identity, in other words, the elimination of conflict, the reconcilia-tion of all those who are opposed to one another because their interests are irreconcil-able, an achieved identity does not mean the identity of all as subsumed beneath atotality, a concept, an integrated society. A truly achieved identity would have to bethe consciousness of non-identity, or, more accurately perhaps, it would have to be thecreation of a reconciled non-identity, much as we find in the utopia conceived byHölderlin [ ::: ]. (Adorno 55)
A nationalist Bildung of non-identity seeks neither to create the ideal nation-peoplesthrough a return of cultural nationalism, nor the adoption of western capitalistnation-statism as a universal or teleological product of progressive history and civi-lization marked by the economic modernization and development of both the nationand the state. Instead, it resists those internal and external neo-imperial forces thatattempt to recreate the world – and thus the nation, the state, and the concept offreedom – in their own monolithic image and instead gives itself over to the threatand promise of the yet to-come, the beautyful ones not yet born.
Notes1. Elsewhere, Lazarus describes Armah’s postcolonial writings generally as being “for all
their militancy, among the bleakest and most disenabling texts to be produced during thefirst decade of independence in Africa” (“(Re)turn” 14). On the novel’s deep abidingpessimism, see also Amuta, Kibera and Nnolim, among many others.
2. See Jameson (Archaeologies 288–89) as well as Marcuse. Although Jameson is referringspecifically to contemporary science fiction in this particular instance, the importance ofthe utopian impulse, as well as its waning, is a hallmark of his work on the culture andpolitics of the late capitalist period in general. Short of any precise definition, the Marcu-sian utopian impulse can best be summed up by the following:
[ ::: ] a work of art can be called revolutionary if, by virtue of the aesthetic transfor-mation, it represents, in the exemplary fate of individuals, the prevailing unfreedomand the rebelling forces, thus breaking through the mystified (and petrified) socialreality, and opening the horizon of change (liberation). (Marcuse xi, my emphasis)
3. I fully intend this use of “weak-utopian impulse” to have a family resemblance withGautam Premnath’s “weak sovereignty” – with both, then, drawing implicitly on Benja-min’s “weak messianism” from “On the Concept of History” (or what in an earlier Eng-lish translation is entitled “Theses on History”).
4. See Booker for a different interpretation of the Utopian character and possibility forArmah’s work in general.
382 H.C. O’Connell
Dow
nloa
ded
by [
Nip
issi
ng U
nive
rsity
] at
09:
51 0
4 O
ctob
er 2
014
Notes on contributorHugh Charles O’Connell is an Assistant Professor of English at Valdosta State University.He recently completed a dissertation entitled “International Nationalisms: Nation, World,Event in Postimperial and British and Postcolonial Anglophone Literatures” at MichiganStage University.
Works citedAdorno, Theodor. History and Freedom: Lectures 1964–65. Trans. Rodney Livingstone. Ed.
Rolf Tiedemann. Cambridge: Polity, 2006.Amuta, Chidi. “The Contemporary African Artist in Armah’s Novels.” World Literature
Written in English 21.3 (1982): 467–76.Armah, Ayi Kwei. The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born. 1968. Oxford: Heinemann, 1969.Booker, M. Keith. “The Historical Novel in Ayi Kwei Armah and David Caute: African Lit-
erature, Socialist Literature, and the Bourgeois Cultural Tradition.” Critique 38.3 (1997):235–48.
Cheah, Pheng. Spectral Nationality: Passages of Freedom from Kant to Postcolonial Litera-tures of Liberation. New York: Columbia UP, 2003.
Chow, Rey. Primitive Passions. New York: Columbia UP, 1995.Derrida, Jacques. “Marx and Sons.” Jacques Derrida et al. Ghostly Demarcations: A Sympo-
sium on Jacques Derrida’s Specters of Marx. Ed. Michael Sprinker. London: Verso,1999. 213–69.
——. Specters of Marx. New York: Routledge, 1994.Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth. 1961. Trans. Richard Philcox. New York: Grove,
2004.Gramsci, Antonio. Selections from the Prison Notebooks. 1971. New York: International,
2005.Hardt, Michael, and Antonio Negri. Empire. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2000.Hitchcock, Peter. “Postcolonial Failure and the Politics of the Nation.” South Atlantic Quar-
terly 106.4 (2007): 727–52.Jackson, Tommie L. The Existential Fiction of Ayi Kwei Armah, Albert Camus, and
Jean-Paul Sartre. Lanham, MD: University P of America, 1997.Jameson, Fredric. Archaeologies of the Future. London: Verso, 2005.——. The Political Unconscious. Ithaca, NY: Cornell UP, 1981.Kibera, Leonard. “Pessimism and the African Novelist: Ayi Kwei Armah’s The Beautyful
Ones Are Not Yet Born.” Journal of Commonwealth Literature 14.1 (1979): 64–72.Lazarus, Neil. “Disavowing Decolonization: Fanon, Nationalism, and the Problematic of
Representation in Current Theories of Colonial Discourse.” Research in African Litera-tures 24.4 (1993): 69–98.
——. “(Re)turn to the People: Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o and the Crisis of Postcolonial AfricanIntellectualism.” The World of Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o, Ed. Charles Cantalupo. Trenton, NJ;African World, 1995. 11–26.
Marcuse, Herbert. The Aesthetic Dimension: Towards a Critique of Marxist Aesthetics. Bos-ton: Beacon, 1978.
Moylan, Tom. Scraps of the Untainted Sky. Boulder: Westview, 2000.Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o. Writing Against Neocolonialism. Trenton: Red Sea, 1986.Nnolim, Charles E. “Dialectic as Form: Pejorism in the Novels of Armah.” African literature
Today 10. Ed. Eldred Jones. London: Heinemann, 1979. 207–23.Premnath, Gautam. “The Weak Sovereignty of the Postcolonial Nation-State.” World Bank
Literature. Ed. Amitava Kumar. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2003. 253–64.Said, Edward. Culture and Imperialism. New York: Vintage, 1994.Schueller, Malini Johar. “Decolonizing Global Theories Today.” Interventions 11.2 (2009):
235–54.Slaughter, Joseph. Human Rights, INC: The World Novel, Narrative Form, and International
Law. New York: Fordham UP, 2007.
Journal of Postcolonial Writing 383
Dow
nloa
ded
by [
Nip
issi
ng U
nive
rsity
] at
09:
51 0
4 O
ctob
er 2
014