Excremental Vision: A Comparative Study of Armah’s The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born and Soyinka’s The Interpreters

Abstract

Abstract To read Armah’s The Beatyful Ones Are Not Yet Born and Soyinka’s The Interpreters is to decode the meaning of excremental vision Armah and Soyinka exploit by using excremental language, especially images of shit and feces, not only to reverse past colonial representations but also to express postcolonial disillusionment and to satirize the failures of colonial development and the corruptions of neocolonial politics. In Armah’s excremental vision, shit and its corporeal familiars like phlegm, drool, vomit, sweat, piss, and blood emerge as an index of moral and political outrage in a new Ghana bedeviled by greed and bureaucratic corruption. Similarly, in The Interpreters, a story of intellectuals in decolonized Nigeria, Soyinka uses excremental language to present political and corporate misdeeds in terms of unhealthy digestion. His characters like Sekoni and Sogoe are disillusioned because of their project killed by the forces of corruption.