An African (Auto)biography: Ama Ata Aidoo's Literary Quest

461 Pages·2011·1.47 MB·English

by  Xavier Tortajada Estruch

Esther Pujolràs i Noguer
An African (Auto)biography: Ama
Ata Aidoo’s Literary Quest

This dissertation has been supervised by Dr. Felicity Hand
Cranham
Departament de Filologia Anglesa i Germanística
Facultat de Filosofia i Lletres

Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona
2010

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Contents

Introduction. As Always ... a Painful Declaration of Independence, 1

Part I. The Cave: Colonialism in Black and White, 23

One. Unveiling the Ghost: Heart of Darkness or Africa-Chronotope Zero,
29

Two. (Auto)Biographical Fiction: The Facing and De-Facing of Africa, 59

I. Lettering the Stone: Négritude and the Pan-African Ideal,
73
II. De-Facing Négritude: The Mother Africa Trope and the
Discourse of Double Consciousness, 102

Part II. The Cave Revisited: Towards a Subjectification of Africa and
African Women, 127

Three. Without Cracks? Fissures in the Cave: The Middle Passage, 133

I. Nation, Home, Africa … The Birth of the African Dilemma or
The Dilemma of a Ghost, 144
II. Myth, History, Africa: Anowa As the Source of the
Dilemma?, 164

Four. The Postcolonial Arena: No Sweetness Here or the Travails of
Africans after Independence, 189

I. Problematizing History and the Nation Paradox, 194
II. Writing the Independent Nation, 207

Five. The White Hole: Our Sister Killjoy or Reflections from a Black-Eyed
Squint, 275

I. Good Night Africa, Good Morning Europe: The Limits of
Writing Back and the Call for a Postcolonial Readership,
280
II. Ja, Das Schwartze Mädchen: The Challenge of Tradition and
the Female African Voice, 290

Conclusions. My Dear Sister, the Original Phoenix Must Have Been a Woman,
337

Select Bibliography, 389
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Acknowledgements

I am indebted to the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation (Micim)
for the mobility grant (Ref. TME 2008-01301) which has allowed me to
complete my research at the University of Sussex, United Kingdom, and
the School of Oriental and African Studies, United Kingdom.

I want to thank Prof. Stephanie Newell for accepting to be my research
mentor during my stay at the University of Sussex.

I am extremely grateful to the Department of Black Studies at the
University of Legon, Accra (Ghana) for attending me without a previous
appointment. And, most specially, I want to thank Prof. Kofi Anyidoho
for giving me Ama Ata Aidoo’s telephone number.

A very warm thanks to ALL my friends who have always encouraged
me, supported me, made me laugh when I most needed it and, above all,
have endured my “obsession” with my dissertation with admirable
patience and resignation. Thank you, Alexandra, Ana, Anna, Chris, Elisa,
Isabel, Lola, Maria, Mª Carmen B., MªCarmen G., MªJosé, Ricardo, Sara,
Vicky.

Three very special thanks:

The first one goes to Alexandra whose technological expertise have
made my life –in the last hysterical stages of this dissertation- much
easier. Thank you also for your patience, understanding and warmth
during the whole process.

The second one goes to Lola, who had the power to make me feel I was
doing something special. Thank you, Sister, for your optimism and
absolute confidence in what you call my “talent,” whatever that means.

The third one goes to Chris and Vicky who have always welcomed me in
their home in Brighton. Your warmth was the perfect antidote to the,
very often, cold English weather. Thank you for taking care of me and
making my stay a memorable experience: Glyndebourne will always be in
my mind.
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A very special thanks to Dr. Aránzazu Usandizaga who guided me in my
first important academic incursion, my graduate thesis. Thank you for
introducing me to the work of women writers when I was still an
undergraduate student and for the generosity and kindness you have
always shown me. Although this dissertation has taken me to the African
continent, my academic journey started in Afro-America thanks to your
teaching. This journey to Africa would not have been possible without
this prior step, Afro-America, and so, I would also like you to feel part of
this adventure.

And I want to thank most warmly Felicity, my travelling companion
around the postcolonial world, who, once again, has travelled with me on
this very special postcolonial journey. Thank you for your guidance, your
encouragement, your advice, your criticism, your support and, above all,
thank you for your friendship. We were friends when we embarked on
this adventure and we have remained friends throughout the journey. I
know that this adventure is just the beginning for future ones.

I do not have the words to express my immense gratitude to the woman
that made this journey possible, Ama Ata Aidoo. In the critical moments,
when enthusiasm dented, I always found in your work a line of
inspiration. Thank you, Ama Ata, for being you: a brave, independent,
incredibly talented African woman.

Gràcies a la meva família: els meus pares, Josep i Antònia, la meva
germana, Mª Dolors, el meu “germà”, Josep Mª, i la meva neboda, Anna.
Als meus pares, especialment, a qui dedico aquesta tesi, els vull agrair
que sempre m’hagin acceptat com sóc i que, per damunt de tot, hagin
respectat i encoratjat la meva independència. Moltes gràcies, mama, per
ensenyar-me aquest camí alternatiu on una dona com jo ha pogut créixer
amb llibertat i ha pogut aprendre a ésser ella mateixa. Moltes gràcies,
papa, per sempre dir “sí” a les meves aventures de coneixement, fossin
les que fossin.
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Introduction
As Always … a Painful Declaration
of Independence

I have been happy
being me:

an African
a woman
and a writer.

Just take your racism
your sexism
your pragmatism
off me;

overt
covert or
internalized

And
damn you!

“An Angry Letter in January,” Ama Ata Aidoo1

In 1991 Ama Ata Aidoo’s novel Changes. A Love Story was awarded the
Commonwealth Writers’ Prize (Aidoo, 1991). She was not a novice
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writer at all; her writing career had started almost twenty years earlier
and her presence in the world of African letters was indisputable. This
novel meant the definitive critical recognition of Aidoo’s work worldwide
as the numerous translations into different languages testify.2 The
reading of Changes is preceded by some apologetic, confiding,
cautionary words by the author, which I believe to be significant for an
understanding of what this novel represents within Aidoo’s oeuvre:

Several years ago when I was a little older than I am now, I said in a
published interview that I could never write about lovers in Accra.
Because surely in our environment there are more important things to
write about? Working on this story then was an exercise in words-eating!
Because it is a slice from the life and loves of a somewhat privileged
young woman and other fictional characters – in Accra. It is not meant
to be a contribution to any debate however current.3

Changes is a contribution to a very “current” –I would add “universal”-
debate: the politics of love, and, what is interesting in this particular
case is that the debate is carried out in the particular space of Africa
and articulated in the particular genre which is the novel. The novel –
understood here as the “modern” novel- is a genre that came to birth
because the new world that was emerging out of modernity needed a
new literary space which would allow it to define itself, develop and
flourish.4 The novel was soon tied to the idea of nation and national
languages, so much so that, as the South African author J.M. Coetzee
argues through the character of Elizabeth Costello, we can talk about
the “English novel,” the “Russian novel,” the “French novel,” . . . what
about the “African novel”?5
Changes is not an overt presence in this dissertation and yet I use
it as the work that opens the door to the other, earlier texts without
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whose existence this novel, I contend, had no possibility to come to
light. It is in those other texts where Aidoo’s voice, perennially imbibed
with Africanness and femaleness is being shaped. Notwithstanding, this
Africanness and this femaleness are not easily granted, they require a
neat, careful, caring, infinitesimally precise chisel with which to carve out
the nuances that conform her experience as writer and woman and
African. Who is Ama Ata Aidoo? What living facts can we ascribe to her
literary self?
Ama Ata Aidoo is an African woman writer. Born in 1943 in
the central region of Ghana, her life has met colonialism –Ghana was the
former British Gold Coast colony-, has been involved with the struggle
for independence –her father was a chief who was imprisoned by the
British because of his participation in the fight for the independence of
his country- has enjoyed and celebrated the euphoria after
independence, has resented and criticised the neocolonialist aftermath
of independence and, throughout, she has always maintained a firm
footing in her being a woman. I read her literary quest –her search for a
voice - as an attempt to bring together the different and differing
aspects that have shaped her experience as a woman in Africa. I claim
that her work cannot be fully apprehended without appreciating the
often ambivalent, ambiguous and contradictory realities that forge her
identity –her (auto)biography- as a writer, a woman and an African. In
other words, her literary quest delineates the personal journey that took
her from a past inception as Christine Ama Ata Aidoo to the present
inscription as Ama Ata Aidoo. Her acceptance of the African name –Ama
Ata Aidoo- in detriment of the European one –Christine- should be
understood as a process in which a subject is defined through and by
writing.
4

In Aidoo’s fiction the old, we could even call legendary, fight
between the personal and the public, the individual and the political is
articulated within the overwhelming reality of the modern African
nations, which, we cannot forget, is a legacy from colonialism. When
Harold Bloom in The Anxiety of Influence expressed his concern about
the textual bulk of tradition that haunts the imagination of writers when
trying to define their own voice, he was unshakably grounded in Western
soil, that is to say, he was exclusively considering the literary tradition of
the West (Bloom, 1973). But what happens when the voice sought after
is the outcome of a polemical –to say the least- inheritance, that of a
markedly textual Western tradition, on the one hand, and an
unquestionable and determining African experience loaded with the heft
of its own oral tradition, on the other? As Ada Uzoamaka Azodo and
Gay Wilentz assert in their introductory chapter –“A Breath of Fresh
Air”- to Emerging Perspectives on Ama Ata Aidoo, Aidoo’s fiction is
“the site of the dilemmas of modern African nations between the
personal and the public, the individual and the community.“ And, they
add,

(...) The heroines embody their author’s life tensions, ambitions, desires,
and griefs. The more public the work appears, the more indeed it calls us
back to the personal basis of the fiction: the effects of exile, alienation
and isolation on personal lives; the role of family and society in forging
human understanding; African oral tradition as expression of self,
especially women’s lives in a time of changes, conflicts, choices, crises,
and the instinctual including sexuality. If we have not so far seen the
entire journey of a woman writer expressed in her creative works, we
prophesize here that we will not be kept long waiting (Azodo et al.,
1999: xix).