African postcolonial fiction and the poetics of eco-cultural decadence: Re-reading Ayi Kwei Armah’s The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born and Sembène Ousmane’s Xala

Abstract

In the depiction of post-independence Africa, the collapse of traditional moral values is a major preoccupation. This concern is often represented in the form of despicable behaviors exhibited by characters, often influenced by Western ideologies, and also in metaphors of decay or decadence. Decadence, from the literary sense of the word, could be interpreted as the moral or cultural rottenness of a community and in the literal usage of the term, it can be understood as an environmental uncleanness. Morally, a society is decayed if its moral principles and philosophies of living are weak while in the physical manifestation of the sense of the term, a decayed environment is associated with filth, pollution and physical rottenness. This paper examines the deployment of decadence as symptomatic of moral collapse and of environmental defacement in Ayi Kwei Armah’s The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born and Sembène Ousmane’s Xala. We read these texts in a theoretical context drawn from insights in postcolonial ecocriticism. While our analysis will concentrate on the ecopolitical force of the narratives, we will also examine the aestheticization of decay as a narrative device – a metaphor that foregrounds humans’ role, either by their complacency or collaboration, in destroying their environment. A critical attention will be paid to how the degradation of the environment results in the degradation of the humans as well. We conclude by pointing out that the representation of physical and moral decadence in postcolonial African literature is one way of indicting humans for degrading the environment in their quest for material acquisition.