There are two passing references to the cinema in Ayi Kwei Armah’s 1968 novel The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born. Most of the novel is in the third person, describing the struggle of an unnamed man to live in post-independence Ghana, and to satisfy the desires of his “loved ones” without getting involved in corruption. Temptations range from the everyday taking of bribes in the railway office where he works to a suggestion that he help a politician, Joseph Koomson, to defraud the state.
But a third of the way into the novel there is a sequence of 16 pages in the first person, recalling events before independence. I’m still not sure if these are the man’s memories or those of his friend, Teacher, but they include a description of the docks.
“The wharves turned men into gulls and vultures, sharp waiters for weird foreign appetites to satisfy, pilots of the hungry alien seeking human flesh. There were the fights, of course, between man and man, not so much over women as over white men asking to be taken to women, and the films brought the intelligent mind clever new fashions in dress and in murder.”
What kind of dress and what means of murder are left hanging. Possibly he is thinking of gangster films rather than the usual westerns, but there are no clues.
Fashion also produces the second reference, in a description of Koomson’s wife.
“She contemplated the diamond on her third finger, raised the hand itself, in the manner of a languid white woman in the films, to raise a curl that was obscuring her vision and push it back into the main mass of her wig, and continued as if no human voice had interrupted her.”
Again the suggestion is film noir, but that is little more than a guess.
Going to the cinema makes no appearance. Entertainment, escapism and status instead comes from the radio and reel-to-reel tape machines. There is even a passing reference to television, again as a status symbol.
text © Ian Mundell 2016
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