The Power Of Signifying And Polarisation In Ayi Kwei Armah’s The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born (1968) And Rachid Mimoun’s Le Fleuve Détourné (1982)

The present article examines from a comparative perspective Ayi Kwei Armah’s The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born (1968) and Rachid Mimouni Le fleuve détourné (1982). It will be argued that as intellectual tricksters, both authors deploy textual “outbreaks” that erupted in vehement but subtle denunciations to provide a vision of societies that emerged from cruel times of colonialism to be engulfed in neocolonialism. They use verbal indirection, signifying oratory, and polarisation as deviation tactics to revise their cultures. The devices derive from the African verbal expression of implicit meaning akin to the African Trickster Tradition and are uttered in the grotesque mode of writing where satire and character type became the appropriate mode for social criticism.