The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born by Ayi Kwei Armah

Author:Ayi Kwei Armah [Armah, Ayi Kwei]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction, General, @westerncanon
ISBN: 9780435905408
Google: adDP11OQ-7oC
Amazon: 0435905406
Publisher: Heinemann
Published: 1988-01-15T13:57:18+00:00

There is something powerful that has burned him. The na­ked body is a covering for a soul once almost destroyed, now full of fear for itself, and full of a killing anguish at what this fear makes impossible. But the man has never really known the thing that turned his friend into a human being hiding from other human beings. Intimations of beliefs held with too great passion and sincerity in the past, of many heavy things seen with a clarity that destroys a person’s peace, and that is all. This naked body has an outward calmness about it, but inside it how much power is lying hidden from the watching eye, how much of the terrible energy of a human being fired with strong belief? Something comes out at times, and then it is quickly drawn in again. The man remembers times when his friend has been drawn to speak of something outside himself, and the things he believed were no longer so well hidden, and he had talked in the way he had, that parted everything so clearly into the light and the shadow, the greatly beautiful things that could be and the starkly ugly things that are, so many true pictures given to the listening mind with words, bringing un­derstanding where none had been before. But what a painful kind of understanding, so that he wastes it all in the end with other words that destroy the pictures, words that mix the beauty with the ugliness, words making the darkness twin with the light, and in the end he says what he now believes, that in the end that is the one remaining truth. The man wonders, sitting there, whether this resignation does not make his naked friend infinitely smaller than he could be. Why should there be such a need for shrinking the hoping self, and why must so much despair be so calmly embraced? Is so much protection neces­sary from life itself? Once the man had asked his friend about this his calmness and his despair, wondering why Teacher should remain so unwilling to move closer to those of his old friends who were now in power. Surely, something could still be done by a good man.

First, Teacher had asked the man, “Something for which people?” But he had not waited for an answer. “The things people want, I do not have to give. And no one wants what I happen to have. It’s only words, after all.”

The man had said something earnest about the connectedness of words and the freedom of enslaved men, but then Teacher had said one of the harshest things he had ever said. With a shrug he had said that men were all free to do what they chose to do, and would laugh with hate at the bringer of unwanted light if what they knew they needed was the dark. He had told a story he said had meant more to him in his unhappiness than any other story, something he called the myth of Plato’s cave.

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