The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born

Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1969

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Summary

Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapters 1-3

Chapters 4-6

Chapters 7-9

Chapters 10-12

Chapters 13-15

Character Analysis

Themes

Symbols & Motifs

Essay Topics

Important Quotes

Chapters 7-9Chapter Summaries & Analyses

Chapter 7 Summary

Teacher walks the man back in the direction of his house while they talk about the social pressure to conform in order to give one’s family a high standard of living. Back in bed, the man pushes his fingers into Oyo’s vagina while she’s asleep, and he hopes both for a sign of her sexual arousal and for the illusion of a stranger’s body. However, his hand brushes a scar on her belly from childbirth, shattering the illusion.

Chapter 8 Summary

The man wakes after a dream in which he loses a female companion to men in American vehicles coming from a set of bright, white towers. He goes to bathe, noticing the rot and mold in the bathroom. On his way to work, he slips in vomit in front of the train station. The man has a bout of diarrhea at the office bathroom, where he notices the excrement and written messages on the bathroom walls. The man sees the timber-cutting contractor with the allocations clerk and his supervisor (who he notes is a corrupt former Minister of Education). The man walks by the harbor, where he sees a ship with Black laborers working underneath the gaze of two white men above the deck of the ship.

Chapter 9 Summary

The man goes to buy expensive imported food, which Oyo has requested they serve as part of dinner with Koomson and Estie. He and Oyo clean the house and prepare to host dinner. The man remembers that he once had dreams of going to the University of Legon, but then Oyo became pregnant. He remembers the dreams he once had, but he also admits to himself that the anguish he had felt when he heard of Oyo’s pregnancy was “not entirely genuine” (117).

The man takes his children to his mother-in-law’s house, where she treats him with derision, disappointment, and judgment for not joining the new economy of bribes and corruption. The man walks past a golf course and notes that in the wealthy neighborhoods in the hills, the houses have plates with hyphenated Ghanaian and English names.

Chapters 7-9 Analysis

Chapter 7 follows the more expansive, internal Chapter 6. Chapter 7 parallels the man’s abrupt return to reality—his country’s political struggles, the trauma of the recent colonial past, and his alienation from the people in his life. The man asks Teacher how it is possible not to want to give his children a more comfortable life, or how he can look at Oyo without seeing how much happier she would be if he conceded. The man’s return to the physical reality of the present is mirrored by how his fantasy of a stranger’s body ends when he touches the scar on Oyo’s body; the scar here represents Ghana’s struggles in the past, and the man realizes that his knowledge of the past will always impede his idealism for the future. Giving in to corruption will have no positive effect on their lives.

Chapter 8 emphasizes themes of rot, waste, and decay. Throughout his day, the man encounters various types of bodily waste. Although he may cringe from them, there is no way to avoid them completely. The filth surrounds him—in bathrooms, in the street, and in his office, where the corruption of his co-workers is a type of figurative dirt that soils the environment. It is almost impossible for the man to remain clean. This dirtiness represents the impossibility of an average citizen of Ghana to remain untouched by the corruption, dishonesty, and moral decay of the political administration. The chapter ends with an image that reminds the man of how little distance there is between post-independence Ghana and the traumatic legacy of the colonial past.

Chapter 9 emphasizes the man’s feelings that the elite tier in Ghanaian society is full of imitators, liars, and false saviors. Although the man knows he cannot afford the imported foodstuffs for his wealthy guests, he still feels an “uncontrollable feeling of happiness and power” (114) that he can own them. The man feels the lure of money and power when he buys the food, but also when he sees the admiring glances of the other people in the shops. For once, the man feels like he is doing things the “right way.” This feeling disappears when he returns home, and he and Oyo do their best to spruce up their small, shabby house. On his way back home from his mother-in-law’s house, the man reflects once more on Ghanaians who mimic white British men, either through fake English accents or hyphenating their last names with an English name. As the man looks at the evidence of these names, he notes that “in the forest of white men’s names, there were the signs that said almost aloud: here, lives a black imitator” (126).