Parable of Yearning

THE BEAUTYFUL ONES ARE NOT YET BORN by Ayi Kwei Armah. 215 pages. Houghton Mifflin. $4.95.

In the world of the haves and the havenots, the real losers may be the half-haves. They are the ones who come close enough to the rainbow to count the stripes, the ones who are suckered into stretching out their arms toward the pot of gold they will never touch.

Ayi Kwei Armah, 28, is a young Ghanaian novelist whose heart breaks in a jerry-built hell of token down payments on infinite desires. The saving grace for readers is that Harvard-educated Armah is an artist right to his sizzling nerve ends. In this brilliant little novel, he takes the small, smoldering resentments of West Africa's perennially shortchanged people and explodes them into a crackling protest against the whole of human suffering.

Enervated Limbo. Armah's anonymous antihero, referred to as "the man," works in a dim, suffocating traffic-control center, where he tracks the erratic routing of decrepit trains he never sees. The scene suits his mental state, for he lives in the cheerless, enervated limbo of post-revolution letdown. He has learned the dispiriting lesson that freedom from colonialism does not mean freedom from exploitation--particularly when the new masters are black liberals less interested in tipping the revolution than in driving their recently acquired Mercedes. He has learned that the lusts for both blood and money know no ideology. He has learned that, for all these problems, there are "no saviors. Only the hungry and the fed."

Novelist Armah states his dilemmas so passionately that they come to carry the force of a parable. His Everyman numbly but stubbornly seeks an honorable--a human--way to survive the "endless round that shrinks a man to something less than the size and the meaning of flying ants." Relentlessly staging a Job-like trial-by-humiliation, Armah daubs "the man" with spit, phlegm and sweat. Rot and stink--the look and smell of corruption--rise up from every page. It is a classmate, Koomson, who perfumes all the putrefaction with the sweet smell of his success as a self-serving official of the new regime.

When the regime runs into a counterrevolution, Armah allows his anti-hero the magnanimous, near-heroic gesture of saving Koomson's life. But even here the author compels him to tunnel out of a latrine to do it.

The Death to Bear. It is as if. against all his impulses, Armah will not show pity--will not permit life to be more than the choice, as he puts it, of "what kind of death we can bear." With bafflement, almost with rage, he confronts "the man" he himself has created and asks: Was there not something "unnatural in any man who imagined he could escape the inevitable decay of life and not accept the decline into final disintegration?"

Armah can barely allow his character the luxury of hope. Out of the once-crushed idealist's instinct for self-protection, he cannot allow himself any hope at all--in the text. But what a tidal wave of yearning surges under that title! For Armah, at heart, is still a dreamer who shakes his defiant fist at the world because he has not yet found it worthy of the dreams he weaves about it.

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