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BIOGRAPHY
Ama Ata Aidoo was born on March 23, 1942, in the Fanti town Abeadzi Kyakor in central Ghana. As a child of Nana Yaw Fama, a chief of Abeadzi Kyakor, and her mother Maame Abba Abasema, Aidoo grew up with a clear sense of African traditions and a Western education. Aidoo describes her father as a ‘‘highly politicized individual and an artist’’ and regards her mother as politi- cized in her own way (James, 13). Looking back to her parents and her grand- father, who was imprisoned, tortured, and killed by the British, Aidoo sees herself as ‘‘coming from a long line of fighters’’ (James, 13).
Aidoo attended Wesley Girls’ High School in Cape Coast and received her bachelor’s degree (a B.A. in English with honors) in 1964 from the University of Ghana, Legon. During the same year Aidoo completed her first play, The Dilemma of a Ghost, which was performed by the Students’ Theatre in Legon in March 1964. At the beginning of her career as a writer, Aidoo won a prize in a short-story competition organized by Ibadan’s Mbari club. Aidoo’s major work includes two plays, The Dilemma of a Ghost (1965) and Anowa (1970), a short-story collection, No Sweetness Here (1970), two novels, Our Sister Kill- joy (1977) and Changes (1991), and a volume of poetry, Someone Talking to Sometime (1985).
Aidoo has taught, lectured, and studied at numerous universities in West and central Africa and in the United States. She has been a professor of English at the University of Ghana, Cape Coast, was a fellow at the Institute for African Studies at the University of Ghana, where she wrote and researched Fanti drama, has served as a consulting professor to the Washington bureau of the Phelps- Stokes Fund’s Ethnic Studies Program (1974–75), has attended an advanced creative writing course at Stanford University, and has been at the Harvard International Seminar. Aidoo also held the position of Minister of Education under the government of Jerry Rawlings in 1983–84. Aidoo explains that she sought this position because she believes in the crucial importance of education and because she wanted direct access to political influence and power.
What characterizes Aidoo as much as her heroines is a strong historical and political awareness of Africa’s colonial past and post-colonial present, and par- ticularly a powerful sense of the problems facing an African woman in and outside of Africa. This ‘‘hypersensitivity,’’ as Aidoo calls it, to the pains and confusions common to Africans, and particularly to African women, accounts both for the focus on human suffering and the stylistic and linguistic concerns of Aidoo’s work.
To Aidoo, being a writer and being a mother have been two important and enriching aspects of her life. Most recently, Aidoo has been living in Harare, Zimbabwe, where she writes. She is the mother of one daughter, Kinna Liki- mani.
MAJOR WORKS AND THEMES
In an interview, Aidoo once said: ‘‘You come to literature or things like that, and it’s then that you really understand a term like neo-colonialism. . . . It’s beautiful to have independence, but it’s what has happened to our minds that is to me the most frightening thing about the colonial experience’’ (McGregor, 26). Aidoo’s entire work speaks powerfully to this issue. Her writing focuses on the psychological impact of the colonial and post-colonial experience on her male and particularly her female characters; her writing is not about overt po- litical action but about the individual pains, struggles, and confusions of her heroines and heroes as they are striving to create meaningful lives in and outside of Africa in the psychological, cultural, linguistic, and political chaos of a post- colonial reality. Aidoo particularly focuses on the often hopeless search of her female characters to find happiness in marriage and to find solidarity in other women.
Aidoo’s first play, The Dilemma of a Ghost (1965), tells the story of the marriage between Ato Yawson, a young Ghanaian studying in America, and Eulalie, an African-American who meets Ato in the United States. As a married couple, both return to Ghana to Ato’s family. The play articulates the difficulties that arise from the clash of the traditional family values of Ato’s family and Eulalie’s often naı¨ve hopes and preconceptions about ‘‘coming home’’ to Africa; the play particularly highlights Ato’s failure to negotiate both sides or even to be sensitive to them and his own role as interpreter. While this play accentuates the almost unsurmountable problems of the educated African male returning to his home country, Aidoo suggests in the final reconciliation between Eulalie and her Ghanaian mother-in-law a female solidarity that may resolve some of the conflicts inside the African diaspora.
The play Anowa (1970) retells an old legend of a woman marrying a man against the will of her parents. Anowa, like Aidoo’s other heroines, is a woman whose historical awareness and determination to choose her own destiny and husband lead to her tragic end. In this play, Aidoo revises a legend told to her by her mother and gives it a tragic, ‘‘pseudo-Freudian’’ (McGregor, 23) ending. Set in the 1870s on the Gold Coast, the play presents the story of Anowa’s marriage to Kofi and its eventual failure. Anowa and Kofi become increasingly alienated when Kofi begins to buy slaves in order to obtain riches. Anowa’s sense of slavery as an unethical institution that connects the black slaveholder with the white colonists isolates her more and more from her husband Kofi . While Anowa’s and Kofi’s business flourishes, their marriage fails. Anowa is driven almost into insanity because nobody will back her in her ‘‘hypersensi- tive’’ reaction to her husband’s role as slaveowner. The play ends tragically with the suicide of both Anowa and Kofi when Anowa reveals that Kofi’s power as a slaveowner masks his impotence as a man. Aidoo shows that the slow disintegration of her heroine’s mind and social position is a result of Anowa’s insistence on her own moral and political standards. In this play, Aidoo further suggests that the people in Anowa’s environment, her husband but also her family and her neighbors, are partially responsible for Anowa’s unhappiness and death because they judge before they think. It is Anowa’s insistence on her historical perspective and her individualized decisions that make her an outcast and that render her unable to find a meaningful and sane life for herself, or even just to survive. It is this insistence also that reveals the underlying sexual and moral insecurities that define her husband’s and neighbors’ inability to face history and their own position and responsibilities in it.
Aidoo’s short-story collection No Sweetness Here (1970) once again illus- trates that Aidoo is interested in the impact of the post-colonial situation on all people, urban and rural, old and young, men and women. The title of the first story of the collection, ‘‘Everything Counts,’’ alludes to Aidoo’s comprehensive and touchingly human vision in these well-crafted stories. For example, in ‘‘The Cutting of a Drink’’ and ‘‘Two Sisters’’ Aidoo tackles the issue of prostitution in the city; in the story ‘‘For Whom Things Did Not Change’’ she depicts the consciousness of an African who remains, despite independence, the ‘‘slave’’ of his young master; the story ‘‘Everything Counts’’ deals with the troubling issues of a black female character and her struggle with white beauty ideals. Aidoo depicts the many different confusions and dilemmas her African char- acters face in post-colonial Africa: the dilemma between Western and African values, the country and the city and the individual urge to succeed in Western terms, and the traditional values sacrificed on the way.
Our Sister Killjoy (1977) is Aidoo’s most radically experimental book. Writ- ten in a mixture of verse and prose, this novel depicts the vexed consciousness of Sissie, who cannot experience joy but relives the colonial past when visiting England and venturing into the ‘‘heart of darkness’’ of Bavaria, Germany. It is the radical style of this novel that makes it perhaps Aidoo’s most programmatic book; with dramatic irony that distances the writer from her character, Aidoo is able to express her main concerns through the troubled consciousness of her character Sissie—a character who feels uncomfortable about the use of a lan- guage that ‘‘enslaved’’ her, who looks at a German castle as symbolizing the tyrannical and exploitative system that enabled its construction, who speaks about organ donors and medical advances in terms of the inherent racism in such a system (blacks giving organs for whites), who urges her male compatriots to return to Ghana, who experiences racism and ignorance about Africa through- out her journeys, and who finally accepts that her former lover and the person sitting next to her in the plane may consider her crazy; she does not care about being considered crazy because she realizes that her concerns are crucial to her return to Africa. Aidoo’s experimental mixture of genres and her stylized use of language (sometimes one word covers an entire page) expresses the discom- fort of the consciousness of Sister Killjoy and the ways in which Sissie’s vision destabilizes our own sense of a narrative and challenges our expectations. It also places Sissie’s consciousness at the verge of sanity, at a place of ‘‘hypersensi- tivity’’ that, like Anowa’s, comes along with a strong and strongly expressed historical and political consciousness. Aidoo’s uncomfortable novel is a partic- ularly successful and challenging artistic rendering of the psychological conse- quences of political and historical awareness in the post-colonial era.
Aidoo’s volume of poems Someone Talking to Sometime (1985) allows her to make many voices heard. The poems range from dramatic monologues of mothers and lovers to satirical representations of political speech. In these po- ems, as in Our Sister Killjoy, Aidoo can mix the representation of an individual consciousness with the programmatic, the personal with the political. It is in her satire as well as in the urgency and the troubled nature of the voices she rep- resents that Aidoo once again provides a comprehensive picture of human suf- fering, political injustice, the problems of neocolonialism, and some faint glimmers of hope.
It is well known that Aidoo once claimed that she would never write a story about two lovers in Accra, and it is a sign of her changing perspective of what constitutes the political that she, after all, decided to write about just that in her latest novel. Commenting on her latest love story set in Accra, Aidoo says that she ‘‘is beginning to say that love or the workings of love is [sic] also political’’ (James, 14). In Changes (1991) Aidoo aptly portrays the search of her heroine Esi, an urban professional young woman working in the Department of Urban Statistics, for a ‘‘truth’’ that can capture her experience as a woman in post- colonial Accra. While less experimental in style than her earlier novel, this latest piece shares Aidoo’s concern with language and its inability to adequately de- scribe a woman’s experience. Like Sissie, Esi comes to the verge of hysteria trying to find a language that can capture her dilemmas and confusions. It is neither the language of feminist, sociological discourse, nor that of her mother, nor that of her friend and ‘‘sister’’ Opokuya that can capture the truth of her experience, her confusions, resistances, and decisions. After divorcing her first husband, who raped her and confined her with his possessiveness, Esi later becomes the second wife of the handsome Ali; while she hopes to find in the polygamous marriage the kind of freedom she needs to pursue her career, such a modern redefinition of polygamy remains impossible, and Esi’s marriage to Ali fails to satisfy her. Torn between traditional and modern demands, desires, and restrictions, Esi’s search for a truth remains unsuccessful. She concludes that there is no ‘‘fashion of loving’’ (Changes, 166) adequate to her needs.
What pervades Aidoo’s work, then, is a particular sensitivity to the plight of the African woman as she struggles for an emotional, political, and moral in- dependence—before and after Ghana’s independence. Representing this strug- gle, Aidoo challenges the concept of marriage, the role of other women in the oppression and liberation of her heroines, the concept of sanity, and finally language and literary forms themselves, as they in their traditional forms seem unable to represent a woman’s truth accurately.
CRITICAL RECEPTION
Aidoo criticism has mostly centered around three interrelated issues: her style or form, her feminism, and her concern with the African diaspora and the con- struction of an African selfhood. Formal studies have emphasized Aidoo’s use of the oral and written tradition. For example, Arlene Elder’s article concentrates on ‘‘Aidoo’s paradoxical role as an artist attempting to continue the moral func- tion of the communal oral performer in an individualistic, materialistic present’’ (117). Elder concludes that ‘‘one may revitalize the forms of traditional culture as Aidoo demonstrates so skillfully in all of her work, but history has guaranteed that the substance, the ethical bond between artist and audience, will probably never return’’ (117). Mildred A. Hill-Lubin shows that Aidoo’s texts are ‘‘talk- ing stories’’ that make us into ‘‘readers/listeners/audience’’ and that show that much of the oral tradition is still ‘‘alive and effective’’ (‘‘Storyteller and Au- dience,’’ 245). Dapo Adelugba examines Aidoo’s use of language in her dramas and shows that Aidoo uses many different linguistic registers to ‘‘portray with veracity and accuracy the different generations and levels of education in pres- ent-day Africa’’ (83).
Typical for a feminist approach is Chimalum Nwanko’s article, which stresses the feminist achievements of Aidoo’s writings and stands in a telling tension to Elder’s formal study. To Nwanko, Aidoo does not face a paradox but takes ‘‘the lead among other African women in search for social justice through creative literature’’ (159). The experimental nature of Aidoo’s writing becomes a ‘‘de- fiant artistic form in which prose and poetry freely blend with each other. That posture takes care of the feminist campaign for women’s freedom’’ (155) and, according to Nwanko, other issues, such as racism. Caroline Rooney discusses Aidoo’s feminism inside a larger theoretical frame of ‘‘white feminism’’ versus ‘‘black womanism.’’ To Kofi Owusu, who also sees Aidoo’s feminism within the context of ‘‘womanism,’’ Our Sister Killjoy gives a sense of ‘‘structural and linguistic anarchy’’ that serves to ‘‘challenge ‘canonized literature’ that tends to black out Black and blanch out Woman’’ (361). Sara Chetin sees Our Sister Killjoy as a feminist text that ‘‘both structurally and thematically, resists iden- tification with Western male literary traditions [ . . . ] and implicitly [questions] the ways in which the First World feminist reader can enter African female- centered realities and interpret the unfamiliar codes produced by the text’’ (147). She concludes that ‘‘as First World feminists, we ‘listen-in’ from an unprivi- leged position in an attempt to understand the parameters that determine African women’s writing’’ (159).
Kwaku-Larbi Korang and Gay Wilentz concentrate on Our Sister Killjoy’s renegotiations of central and marginal positions. Wilentz discusses ‘‘how the novel exposes a rarely heard viewpoint in literature in English—that of the African woman exile’’ (‘‘Politics of Exile,’’ 161), which works to dispel the myth surrounding the position of the male exile. Korang also sees the novel as ‘‘an other traveler’s tale’’ (51); with Sissie’s return to Africa, according to Korang, Aidoo ‘‘underlines the commitment of the woman novelist to an Af- ricanist project of collective self-discovery’’ (59).
As the single book-length study of Aidoo’s writings, Vincent Odamtten’s The Art of Ama Ata Aidoo (1994) presents a ‘‘polylectic’’ reading of Aidoo’s entire work—a ‘‘self-interpellative’’ reading that attempts to ‘‘account for as many of the complexities of the specific (con)text of the literary/cultural product as pos- sible’’ (5). Odamtten tries to encompass the various critical voices (feminist, formalist, and so on) and even to challenge their ‘‘reductive’’ emphasis on one angle of Aidoo’s work over another. His ‘‘recuperative feminist reading’’ con- siders literary form, feminist concerns, and specific historical contents of Ai- doo’s writing.
Aidoo herself believes in the importance of the literary critics to create through their attention ‘‘female Achebes,’’ to make female writers known and canonized. The increasing amount of criticism written on Aidoo’s work gives me hope that Aidoo is right when she states about women writers: ‘‘Sooner or later, somebody will have to notice that we’ve been around. ’’
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Works by Ama Ata Aidoo
The Dilemma of a Ghost. Accra: Longmans, 1965.
Anowa. London: Longman Group, 1970.
No Sweetness Here. London: Longman Group, 1970.
Our Sister Killjoy. 1977. Hong Kong: Longman African Classics, 1988. Someone Talking to Sometime. Harare: College Press, 1985.
The Eagle and the Chickens and Other Stories. Enugu: Tana, 1986.
Birds and Other Poems. Harare: College Press, 1987.
Changes. London: Women’s Press, 1991.
Works by Ama Ata Aidoo
The Dilemma of a Ghost. Accra: Longmans, 1965.
Anowa. London: Longman Group, 1970.
No Sweetness Here. London: Longman Group, 1970.
Our Sister Killjoy. 1977. Hong Kong: Longman African Classics, 1988. Someone Talking to Sometime. Harare: College Press, 1985.
The Eagle and the Chickens and Other Stories. Enugu: Tana, 1986.
Birds and Other Poems. Harare: College Press, 1987.
Changes. London: Women’s Press, 1991.
Selected Studies of Ama Ata Aidoo
Adelugba, Dapo. ‘‘Language and Drama: Ama Ata Aidoo.’’ African Literature Today 8 (1976): 72–84.
Amankulor, J. ‘‘Ama Ata Aidoo: The Dilemma of a Ghost. ’’ Okike Educational Supple- ment 3 (1982): 137–150.
Berrian, Brenda. ‘‘African Women as Seen in the Works of Flora Nwapa and Ama Ata Aidoo.’’ College Language Association Journal 25.3 (March 1982): 331–339.
Booth, James. ‘‘Sexual Politics in the Fiction of Ama Ata Aidoo.’’ Commonwealth Es- says and Studies 15.2 (Spring 1993): 80–96.
Brown, Lloyd. ‘‘Ama Ata Aidoo.’’ Women Writers in Black Africa. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1981. 84–121.
——— . ‘‘Ama Ata Aidoo: The Art of the Short Story and Sexual Roles in Africa. ’’ World Literature Written in English 13 (November 1974): 172–183.
Bruner, Charlotte. ‘‘Child Africa as Depicted by Bessie Head and Ama Ata Aidoo. ’’ Studies in the Humanities 7.2 (1979): 5–12.
Chetin, Sara. ‘‘Reading from a Distance: Ama Ata Aidoo’s Our Sister Killjoy. ’’ Black Women’s Writing. Ed. Gina Wisker. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1993. 146– 159.
Coussy, Denise. ‘‘Is Life Sweet? The Short Stories of Ama Ata Aidoo.’’ Short Fiction in the New Literatures in English. Ed. Jacqueline Bardolph. Nice: Faculte´ des Lettres et Sciences Humaines de Nice, 1989. 285–290.
Elder, Arlene. ‘‘Ama Ata Aidoo and the Oral Tradition: A Paradox of Form and Sub- stance.’’ African Literature Today 15 (1987): 109–119.
Hill-Lubin, Mildred. ‘‘The Relationship of African-Americans and Africans: A Recurring Theme in the Works of Ama Ata Aidoo.’’ Pre´sence Africaine 124 (1982): 190– 201.
——— . ‘‘The Storyteller and the Audience in the Works of Ama Ata Aidoo.’’ Neohel- icon 16.2 (1989): 221–245.
James, Adeola. ‘‘Ama Ata Aidoo.’’ In Their Own Voices. Ed. Adeola James. London: Heinemann, 1990. 8–27.
Jones, Eldred. ‘‘Ama Ata Aidoo: Anowa. ’’ African Literature Today 8 (1976): 142–144.
Korang, Kwaku-Larbi. ‘‘Ama Ata Aidoo’s Voyage Out: Mapping the Coordinates of Modernity and African Selfhood in Our Sister Killjoy. ’’ Kunapipi 14.3 (1992): 50–61.
Mackenzie, Clayton G. ‘‘The Discourse of Sweetness in Ama Ata Aidoo’s No Sweetness Here.’’ Studies in Short Fiction 32.2 (Spring 1995): 161–170.
McGregor, Maxine Lautre. ‘‘Ama Ata Aidoo.’’ African Writers Talking. Ed. Cosmo Pieterse and Dennis Duerden. New York: Africana, 1972. 19–27.
Needham, Anuradha Dingwaney. ‘‘An Interview with Ama Ata Aidoo.’’ Massachusetts Review 36.1 (Spring 1995): 123–133.
Nwanko, Chimalum. ‘‘The Feminist Impulse and Social Realism in Ama Ata Aidoo’s No Sweetness Here and Our Sister Killjoy. ’’ Ngambika: Studies of Women in African Literature. Ed. Carole Boyce Davies and Anne Adams Graves. Trenton: Africa World Press. 1986. 151–159.
AMA ATA AIDOO 39
Odamtten, Vincent O. The Art of AmaAtaAidoo. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 1994.
Ogede, Ode. ‘‘The Defense of Culture in Ama Ata Aidoo’s No Sweetness Here: The Use of Orality as a Textual Strategy.’’ International Fiction Review 21 (1994): 76–84.
Owusu, Kofi. ‘‘Canons under Siege: Blackness, Femaleness, and Ama Ata Aidoo’s Our Sister Killjoy. ’’ Callaloo 13 (Spring 1990): 341–363.
Ridden, Geoffrey. ‘‘Language and Social Status in Ama Ata Aidoo.’’ Style 8 (Fall 1974): 452–461.
Rooney, Caroline. ‘‘Are We in the Company of Feminists? A Preface for Bessie Head and Ama Ata Aidoo.’’ Diverse Voices. Ed. Harriet Devine Jump. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1991. 214–247.
Wilentz, Gay. ‘‘Ama Ata Aidoo’s The Dilemma of a Ghost. ’’ Binding Cultures: Black Women Writers in Africa and the Diaspora. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992. 38–57.
——— . ‘‘The Politics of Exile: Ama Ata Aidoo’s Our Sister Killjoy. ’’ Studies in Twen- tieth Century Literature 15.1 (Winter 1991): 159–173.
©HILDEGARD HOELLER
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