Christina Ama Ata Aidoo (1943-)



Christina Ama Ata Aidoo (1940-) MAJOR HANDOUT

Anowa (1970; with British premiere in London in 1991 – the play is set in the 1870s)

Joseph Campbell: “And when the writer sends a dart of the true word, it hurts. But it goes with love. This is what Thomas Mann called “erotic irony,” the love for that which you are killing with your cruel, analytical word.”

NEEDED DEFINITIONS

Postcolonial writing - "literature written in English" in the countries which formerly belonged to the British Empire.” Ania Loomba states that postcolonialism is a relatively vague concept, and Christine MacLeod claims that "there is no definitive consensus on what technically constitutes postcoloniality". Most critics nonetheless believe that the term postcolonial is the best solution at the moment because "it points the way towards a possible study of the effects of colonialism…”

Patriarchy – government, rule, or domination by men; a form of social organization wherein the father is recognized as head

Diaspora – any scattering of people with a common origin, background, beliefs

The “canon” – official list or catalogue; writings considered authoritative

Ama Ata Aidoo Biography

1) Born Christina Ama Aidoo on March 23, 1940 (I’ve seen 1942 too) in what was then called the Gold Coast (later known as Ghana). Her father was a chief of Abeadzi Kyiakor (in south central Ghana) and raised as royalty. She attended Wesly Girls High School in Cape Coast and later entered and graduated (1964) from the University of Ghana in Legon.

2) Aidoo began writing in English, though her first language is Fanti. (often a significant issue in post-colonial writing)

3) From 1982 to 1983, Aidoo took a post in the Ghanaian government headed by Jerry Rawlings. She was the minister of education.

4) An aunt [who the play is dedicated to] who never forgave the fate that had not given her more educational opportunities, once told Aidoo during her secondary school years: “My child get as far as you can into this education. Go and go and go. Go until you yourself know you are tired. Because as for marriage, it is something a woman picks up along the way.” (Note the autobiographical parallels with Anowa in relation to views of marriage)

5) NOTE: A West African adage goes, “If you educate a man, you educate an individual. If you educate a woman, you educate a nation.”

6) On Anowa, Aidoo says: “It’s more or less my own rendering of a kind of legend, because, according to my mother, who told me the story, it is supposed to have happened. The ending is my own and the interpretation I give to the events that happen is mine.”

7) Originally, the folktale of Anowa, Aidoo says, “grew directly out of a story” her mother told her, but “as the play has come out, she [mother] cannot even recognize the story.”

8) Aidoo based the play on regional legends and folktales, some which were about “the disobedient daughter”. In such stories, a young woman refuses to marry a suitor, resulting in disaster. Aidoo gave such stories her own twist, incorporating a more complicated portrayal of gender and drawing parallels with contemporary Ghanaian history.

9) A traditional reflection of such patriarchal control appears in the version of a Ghanaian legend told her by her mother which becomes the kernel of Anowa’s story: “A girl married a man who her people did not approve of: she helped him become fantastically rich, and he turn round to sort of drive her away. The original story I heard, which in a way was in the form of a song, didn’t say why he did this…”

QUOTES by Ama Ata Aidoo

10) You can’t cover up history.

11) You see - grief accepted is grief overcome.

12) I have been happy being me: an African, a woman, and a writer.

13) For every problem there is a solution. And so, if we look hard, we will find answers. (realize she is an optimist)

14) Everybody needs a backbone. If we do not refer to the old traditions, it is almost like operating with amnesia.

15) It should be remembered that this type of purgative exposure, however painful it is, is absolutely necessary, depending whether or not one believes the truth as represented in writing can be in any way effective in helping social change. (Note: Aidoo clearly believes that art can (and should) be used as a method of evoking social change)

16) To Aidoo, writers are “part of an articulate minority that handles the language of power.”

17) For us Africans, literature must serve a purpose: to expose, embarrass, and fight corruption and authoritarianism … it is understandable why the African artist is utilitarian.

18) I think that the whole question of how it was that so many people could be enslaved and sold is very important. I’ve always thought that it is an area that must be probed. It holds the key to our future.

19) We are still looking for our scattered belongings from among the ruins of the havoc that it caused. (from an Aidoo poem)

20) I’m not saying at all that sexism was introduced into Africa by colonial men. But it definitely seems that the kind of systematic exclusion that was practiced was born out of a total misunderstanding of how our societies operated … Ours have a double quarrel. Not only as Africans, but also as women. Colonized by the colonizer, then by our men with their new power.

21) Most certainly, my trials as a woman writer are heavier and more painful than any condition I have to go through as a university teacher. It is a condition so delicate that it almost cannot be handled. Like an internal wound and therefore immeasurably dangerous, it also causes a ceaseless emotional hemorrhage. You feel awful for seeing the situation the way you do, and terrible when you try to speak about it. Because this kind of resentment never even comes out in jokes. Yet you have to speak out since your pain is also real, and in fact the wound bleeds more profusely when you are upset by people you care for, those you respect.

22) When people ask me rather bluntly every now an then whether I am a feminist, I not only answer yes, but I go on to insist that every woman and every man should be a feminist – especially if they believe that Africans should take charge of our land, its wealth, our lives and the burden of our own development. Because it is not possible to advocate independence for our continent without also believing that African women must have the best that the environment can offer. For some of us, this is the crucial element of our feminism.

23) I am definitely committed, in my own way to the development of women.

24) At a conference, being challenged by white feminists on one side and African men on the other, Aidoo explains that “out of sheer exasperation, we [the African women panelists] told both the European feminists and the African men resident in Europe that, strange as it may seem, we African women are perfectly capable of making up our own minds and speaking for ourselves.”

25) I think part of the resentment which our brothers feel about any discussion on women is because they feel it diverts from the ‘main issues’. On the contrary, I feel the revolutionizing of our continent hinges on the woman question. It might be the catalyst for development, but people feel very nervous about it. (What Aidoo calls the “woman question” is more complex than the issue of sex roles. It involves larger issues of social, cultural and economic relations, and therefore becomes a paradigm for exploring national culture and agency as a whole.)

26) …because as I am a poet, the novel takes a lot more time. I haven’t written as many novels as I would want because a novel takes so much time. And then I haven’t done as many plays as I probably would want to, because, for the past twenty years or so (interview from 1996), I have not led a stable existence. And without a certain kind of stability, you can’t do drama on the move. You need a stage. You need maybe a company that could produce your plays …. Since Anowa, apart from a radio play, I haven’t done drama. So I’m saying, in terms of sheer volume, I haven’t done as much as I would want; because of the way my life has seemed to work out.

27) In a poem, Aidoo sarcastically lists the roles her society expects an African woman to play: “A sexual aid: a wet nurse and a nursemaid for your children: a cook-steward and general housekeeper: a listening post: an economic and general consultant: a field hand and if you are that way inclined a punch-ball”

28) When I came across Shakespeare (in secondary school), I was like, ‘Ah, this is the other side.’

CRITIC QUOTES about Ama Ata Aidoo

29) Aidoo is at once an outsider and an insider in the world of African literature.

30) Aidoo’s texts are, above all, about evolving life, and with evolving life no one knows what might happen next.

31) Aidoo aims to fulfill the role of the responsible writer.

32) Aidoo refuses to have heroines who see themselves as victims.

33) Aidoo adapts traditional forms to modern versions, sort of putting new wine into an old bottle. (like The Visit)

34) The origins of Aidoo’s early works are based in the lives of ordinary people.

35) Aidoo abhors the separation of genres and has elected instead to build bridges between literary forms.

36) As a writer, Aidoo is at once a fighter and an artist who knows her craft. Her ability to cross genres for effectiveness has by no become her signature tune.

37) Many of Aidoo’s works ridicule the absurdity and the silly actions of humans; therefore, as readers, we are forced to laugh. (The Visit)

38) Her greatest indictment is that we, humans, seem unable to learn from history. We always find a way to keep repeating our silly deeds and cruel acts; nor do we recognize that the acts and deeds reverberate. Therefore, Aidoo considers it as her responsibility to make sure all “good men and women” do not forget.

39) There is this determination in Aidoo to teach, to make sure that the reader has knowledge that she believes is essential (Note – Aidoo is didactic)

40) Aidoo’s work shows an author for whom literature has a double role of humanizing society and serving women’s interests at the same time.

41) Aidoo is a writer who loves her people enough to subject them to severe criticism.

42) It appears that Aidoo is teaching her people where they have been before, so that they may live a better life of awareness in the present.

43) Her female characters are women who feel deeply and respond to their emotions without violence, but who are nonetheless articulate, responsible, enlightened, enterprising, opinionated and self-confident.

44) It is true that African women are presented in her works as intelligent, educated most of the time, enterprising, uninhibited. The heroines embody their author’s life tensions, ambitions, desires, and grief. We submit that Aidoo’s writing is highly self-conscious of the craft of her art. Aidoo’s works are, at least partially, autobiographical [like Miller].

45) For Aidoo, the black world as she imagines it, lived and textual, requires a space for past, presents and futures to face one another.

46) Aidoo is an unusual woman, a forerunner, for a simple reason. She is able to write comfortably the short story, novel, play, poetry, essay, letter, and criticism. Second, she is original in her ability to use any of these genres as the occasion demands, sometimes all in one text, to convey her thoughts to her readers. Third, like her personas, she holds divergent views from those of her community without yielding her ground, but rather all the time aiming at converting her people to her way of thinking. Fourth, due to her immersion in hard-core politics when writers of her generation dodge it in order to avoid negative criticism, Aidoo will always be remembered as a strong literary voice in African and international politics. Finally, her critical and creative writings have led to the development of a kind of African feminism based on the cultural traditions of the community and the region, which relates the political to the personal. She is one of the first women in African literature to address the fact that an acceptance of Western feminism, born from the patriarchal societies of Europe and the US, may not be what feminism has been set up to be for all people at all times; rather she turned to her own Akan cultural milieu, and began to examine what in that culture could direct an indigenous women’s movement that would make sense to the people, untainted by the biases of the colonial encounter.

47) Aidoo stands out both in terms of her resilience as an artist (like Williams), the newness of her subjects, and the invigorating quality of her work on the orature of the past. Here we have an illustrious daughter of Africa who deserves to go down in the annals of African literature as one of the most resourceful and forceful writers the continent has ever known. Aidoo brooks no non-sense. Her women characters are radical on social, political, and economic issues. They rail against the oppression of women without waiting for surrogates from elsewhere to do it for them.

48) There are inevitably tensions between the personal and the political in Aidoo’s works; between the traditions of literary scholarship and the exigencies of African oral tradition. In both the personal and the artistic, Aidoo strives to overcome alienation, isolation and oppression engendered by colonization, imperialism, patriarchy and phallocentrism. Aidoo’s heroines refuse to be victimized.

49) Aidoo’s brand of feminism focuses on the role of women as nation-builders, while also exploring ways to improve the condition of women worldwide, using indigenous, not imported, examples.

50) Because part of Aidoo’s aim as a critical writer is to dislodge many of the preconceptions about African women and look at them “properly”: “Hoping that with some honest, it would be seen that vis-à-vis the rest of the world, the position of the African woman was not only not that bad, but in actual fact, in some of the societies, as in West Africa, she has been far better off than women of so many other societies.”

51) Aidoo, as author and activist, truly integrates the personal with the political as she reaches back to inform us of women’s roles throughout West Africa before the colonial era and compels us to envision another place for women, incorporating this past, in the future. Aidoo does not glorify the past; however she is clear about the realities of an imposed feminism from outside that has its own problems.

52) For Aidoo, the secret of how African women can function in the present is linked to a greater understanding of the past. She has been unswerving in her aim to make sure that Africans do not continue to suffer from cultural “amnesia” concerning the past, either positive or negative.

53) One could link Aidoo’s radical political vision for the Aidoo’s vision is revolutionary since she refuses to take what she calls the “garbage” of the past, aiming instead to find a usable past, made up of “what was healthy in our society.”

54) Taken together, Aidoo’s oeuvre poses a resolution of problems concerning how to create a modern African (specifically, Ghanaian) society based on the patterns and traditions of non-colonized African past within the context of a present-day, technological society; how to engender a rapprochement between Africans and Diasporans; how to maintain the dignity of the African woman in her society.

55) Aidoo defines her literary commitment as an extension of her social vision: “her commitment as an African, the need for her to be an African nationalist, to be a little more pressing.”

56) Drama works well for Aidoo as she attempts to investigate this multi-spaced history and literary tradition. It allows her to present the issues through a heteroglossia, which is also perplexing. Most of Aidoo’s work can be characterized as resembling dilemma tales, a narrative which throws the floor open to debate, demonstrating yet again that in the African context the function of storytelling is to initiate.

57) As a traditional artist, Aidoo sees herself in the service of her community. Her role does not permit her to be only the praise singer who brings a favorable message, but also the voice who will call the wrong doings of the people to their attention with the notion that they will find a way of achieving harmony again. All of her works are quite complex; they reach out on many levels exploring the inter-relationship of the individual and the community, the public and the private, the political and the social. She is most concerned with the interlocking nature of gender, economics, history and race, especially as they impact on the life of the African woman.

58) The African female writers, their literary upsurge unveils a renaissance of the spirit inspired by those who have refused to surrender. Those who have resisted oppression. Those who have undertaken to remake the universe to own their future. Aidoo emphatically belongs to this impressive and determined sisterhood.

59) For Aidoo, the stories of Africa’s unglamorous past and of the continent’s attitude towards that history, must be reconstructed and told so that others may hear and learn from them. The telling for her is cathartic and the first step towards self-healing and “wholeness”.

60) What happens to women when they find the courage to address the injustices of their lives? Are women’s lives still governed by society-biased perceptions of the positions of women? The women in Aidoo’s stories are strong, independent, and often willfully detached from society; yet they remain susceptible to the community’s rules and definitions of womanhood. Although she seems to offer no final analysis or any definitive solution, Aidoo continually poses questions pertaining to how and why African women are subjugated, abused, neglected, and mistreated by post-colonial societies, and often by those they love.

61) Aidoo has made no excuses about the fact that she is a Pan-Africanist and a nationalist. She has reiterated in interviews that one cannot claim to be an African nationalist without being a feminist, whether one is a man or a woman. Her nationalism embodies many facets: she is a strong advocate of affordable education for all and of gender equality; she is distressed with current politics in Africa and demands that the leaders – African men – share power with African women but not as token gestures; she is concerned about health issues, the economy, in short, the future of Africa.

62) We could describe Aidoo authorial project as one which examines in greater detail the lived consequences of those problems that arose from the historical confluence of local and foreign domination and were played out in the dilemmas between personal choices and public imperative. She draws attention to the predicament of women’s marginalization and oppression; however, as she stresses, both in the short stories and elsewhere, these injustices are part of a larger pattern of practices which affront human dignity and self-worth.” (connect last part to Arthur Miller, Durrenmatt)

63) For lack of better or more precise terms, we might divide the Aidoo survivors into “active” and “passive” endurers. The “active” endurers are often unattached younger women finding their way in post-colonial Ghana and their “new life”; the “passive” endurers are usually older, often from the villages, from whom life has not always been kind and gentle.

64) On the topic of Anowa’s possible madness at the end, one critic argues that “ironically the madness of inclusion (in which madness is the norm) can coexist with the madness of exclusion (in which the social madness creates the mad outside)”. One defines madness as “a state in which unconscious processes predominate over conscious ones to the extent that they control them and determine perceptions of and responses to experience that, judged by prevailing standards of logical thought and relevant emotion, are confused but appropriate”.

65) In reading Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart (1958) at school gave Aidoo’s spirit a significant boost: “When I read Things Fall Apart I said, “Oh, so? He can do this.” That is, retrieve and re-affirm African cultural identity. The novel’s genuine attempt to reconstruct Africa’s battered colonial image (see Conrad’s Heart of Darkness) provided a potent stimulus as Aidoo began to contemplate the contours of her own fictional landscape.

66) Aidoo’s career as a writer began while she was still an undergraduate at the University of Ghana with the 1964 performance of The Dilemma of a Ghost (1965). Her work, with its consistent regard for gender issues, effectively uses elements of Ghanaian and African oral traditions and styles to place these concerns in the larger context of Ghana’s and Africa’s struggles against colonialism, neocolonialism and other forms of oppression and exploitation.

67) Through her lucid and evocative language, Aidoo insists that her audience, as participants in their own postcolonial nightmare, must wake up. Her words are like an alarm sounding a dire warning before it is too late to do anything but atrophy.

68) In order to fully comprehend the life and work of Ama Ata Aidoo, it is important to grasp the constant tension between Aidoo the intellectual, Aidoo the ideologue, and Aidoo the revolutionary. This tension has made Aidoo known as a forceful and passionate writer in literary circles and has also harmed her with those among the critics who find her just too aggressive and brash for a woman writer.

69) How did Aidoo’s revolutionary orientation come about? It came from her parents, who were politically aware both of the ravages of colonization on the continent and of the importance of women in the struggle to reestablish African civilization; from her grandfather, who actually died in a colonial prison; from an aunt who sensitized her to the subjugation of women, urging her to embrace education as a means of mitigating the imposed inferiority of women. The foundations for a revolutionary in Aidoo were then laid very early in her life.

70) In conclusion, it is evident that Aidoo’s revolutionary ideology is three-pronged: It is very vehement against isolationism; it is passionate about knowledge based on reason, and it is adamant about pan-Africanism. Aidoo’s commitment as a writer can be summarized simply as a drive against the political and economic exploitation of Africa by forces of imperialism, and a praise of the beauty and glory of a return to Africa and her sense of human values.

71) Ngugi wa Thiong’o writes that language “is both a means of communication and a carrier of culture”. Culture, he maintains, carries “the entire body of values by which we come to perceive ourselves and our place in the world … Language is thus inseparable from ourselves as a community of human beings with a specific form and character, a specific history, a specific relation to the world.”

CRITIC QUOTES about Anowa

72) The play Anowa is a complexly crafted work of art in which multiple subject areas ingenuously intersect to establish Aidoo as a precursor of African women’s creative theorizing of the multiple subjectivity and agency that inform human interaction within a gendered and class-stratified context of existence. A critic notes that the “intersections of coloniality, male dominance, class prejudices, economic exploitation, power and gender dynamics … explored in this play pace it ahead of its time.”

73) The intersections of coloniality, male dominance, class prejudices, economic exploitation, power and gender dynamics which are explored in this play, perhaps placed it ahead of its time. In a way, then, this text, like many other works by women such as Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937), seemed to have to await the theoretical discourses on subjectivity and of feminist critical practice, which would allow it to be read seriously.

74) Part of Aidoo’s project in writing this play was to record in writing, and reproduce on stage, elements from the oral tradition of African culture.

75) Performance is intrinsic to traditional African oral literature, which is perhaps why Aidoo chooses the medium of the play or theatre to imitate as closely as possible the form of oral literature. One can see many ways in which traditional storytelling influences the play’s narrative structure: for instance, she uses a mixture of monologues in verse which introduce and comment on the events and dialogues, which are mostly in prose and acted out by the characters. Within the play, the narrative is broken by songs, dance and music, particularly traditional drum music. She also pays careful attention to costume which symbolically demonstrates, for example, Kofi’s accumulation of wealth (connect with The Visit)

76) In traditional oral literature, the performance of legend and folktales serves several purposes: it is meant to entertain but also to educate or offer an explanation of some sort and it usually characterized by some sort of moralistic ending. Similarly, in Anowa, Aidoo’s purpose is to entertain, but more importantly to incite the audience to think about the issues raised in the play, namely the issue of slavery and the effects of bourgeois capitalist ideology.

77) Typically in her works, the central figure is a sensitive, independent, thought-provoking, angry young woman. She appears to be extremely wise for her age and recognizes the foolishness, cruelty, harshness, injustices that humans inflict upon one another. As Kofi, the male figure in Anowa says about his mate, “You bare our wounds. You are too fond of looking for the common pain and the general wrong.”

78) Anowa is the lone voice in the community, for she alone wishes to uncover the truth so that others may remember and learn from the past. Nana, however, is representative of the collective consciousness whose guilt overwhelms it to forget.

79) As Anowa recognizes from society’s definition, for Anowa to be a “better woman” she would have had to have been silent. In all probability, it is her final realization that there is no way for her to communicate to her society her outspoken opposition to slavery and materialism, embodied in Kofi’s activities, her need for self-determination, and her insistence upon being heard, which leads directly to her drowning.

80) At the start of the play, the young, unmarried Anowa is a very different female from the later, married Anowa. She is sassy, spunky, energetic, and relatively free, free enough to risk choosing her own husband, and to set out with him, filled with the optimism that she could transform him into somebody. Until her marriage, though her wildness is talked about by her mother and everyone else, there is no urgency to make her act differently. The outright antagonism her wildness attracts comes later, when she married Kofi Ako. It is only then it becomes intimated that her assertiveness will not stand her in favorable light as a wife.

81) Like her author, Anowa is engaged in the type of social criticism which Aidoo hopes would lead to consciousness raising about African diasporic history.

82) In Anowa, her second, last and most accomplished play, Aidoo briefly tells the tale of the slave trade and the dissemination of Africans across the globe. Anowa in itself is dialogic; its voices speak to the various intricacies involved in the institution of slavery. As well, it provides us win an insight into why Africans sold their brothers and sisters to the whites.

83) Anowa is a dilemma tale, concerned with not just the female character of its title, alone, but, through the extensive function of orature, with the impossible situation of any woman in a repressive society. A critic praises Anowa because, through its heteroglossic and fluid structure, “the writer, the play, the readers are able to traverse the boundaries of orality, writing and performance.” It is the interweaving of genres and perspective that allows Aidoo’s own understanding of the connection between colonialism and sexism to ring out.

84) One type of folkstory is the “dilemma tale,” which presents social and moral issues in a way which provokes discussion of the topics raised. In many ways, Anowa is a dramatized dilemma tale that Aidoo modified in a modern way.

85) By using the structure of the dilemma tale, Aidoo also draws the audience into this story; the audience in a sense becomes subjects in the historical project of the play. At the end when the Old Man says: “Who knows if Anowa would have been a better woman, a person, if we had not been what we are?”: the “we” includes the audience, particularly the African or specifically Ghanaian one, although it does seem to have broader implications that could also possibly address a Western audience. Rather than simply relay a message, the structure of the play raises questions that the audience must answer for themselves, thus demanding active participation from the audience in interpreting the events that occur. It draws the audience in the play as agents of the tragedy – it forces the audience to feel implicated in the tragedy and to think about the larger issues of the play.

86) These parallel constructs of binary oppositions between characters thus serve to give different arguments or viewpoint on the “dilemma” of Anowa, and thus reinforce the traditional “dilemma tale” structure of the play.

87) The term abiku means “wanderer child. It is the same child who dies and returns again and again to plague the mother – Yoruba belief.

88) Aidoo’s character signifies her identity as a “stranger” both as a gendered person, a woman who is unlike any other woman, and as an individual, estranged from her community because of her social and psychic visions. In this paper, I propose to use the term “abiku,” the identification for the Yoruba “spirit”, to signify Anowa’s identity as a “wanderer”, a migratory and alienated character. The figure of “abiku” represents both Anowa’s spiritual migrations (the returning spirit child) as well as her spatial location as outsider and insider among her people.

89) The primary source of Anowa’s difference is her “abiku” nature as suggested by various characters in the play, including her mother, the old man and woman, and Kofi. In the “Prologue” to the play, the Old Man inscribed Anowa as a “child of several incarnations.” Later her mother identifies her as the returned spirit of a formerly dead child, hence, her restlessness. Anowa is linked to the past (dead) and the present (living) of her people’s life, temporally and psychically. She carries the group’s mythic consciousness, and for Aidoo, she becomes the visionary who “prompts” her people to confront their collective guilt and amnesia about the past (The Visit too).

90) Anowa’s determination, even as a child of eight, to uncover the truth about her people and their history sets her apart from others in the community, a difference which frightens the grandmother, who labels the child “a witch”. But, for Anowa, the story of her people’s bondage and crime against their own people becomes the source of her psychic schism.

91) Recognize links between the arrival of alien and hostile culture and the cold-bloodedness of the new generation represented by Kofi.

92) The play identifies destruction with Kofi’s maleness.

93) Kofi Ako proves to have a weak moral character. He responds to her criticism of his decision to keep slaves by treating her cruelly and amassing even more slaves. The parallels between the slaves and wives are developed, and eventually, Anowa realizes that she is truly alone, having rejected her family and her husband, and unable to bear a child. The play ends with Kofi’s attempts to banish her and assail her character being thwarted, although her victory is Pyrrhic. She publicly asserts that he is impotent. He commits suicide, unable to bear the shame of having his reputation destroyed. Anowa also kills herself, as she is unable to find meaning in her barren and lonely existence.

94) At the end, when the slaves overhear her questioning his manhood, Kofi does not attack Anowa; instead he kills himself. Like their female counterparts, the unacceptable husband in the folk tales also come to bad ends.

95) Kofi Ako’s need to assert his masculinity, and thus achieve full acceptance in his community, hinges both on oppressing others as in slave labor and on subordinating the female.

96) The text’s silences and pauses speak eloquently to the hidden subtext of Kofi’s life.

97) With no alternative paradigms allowed, he chooses the path of oppressing Anowa to prove his manhood in conventional terms, and when that fails self-destruction is his preferred option.

98) To Anowa’s claim that slavery is “evil”, Kofi is determined to show his male chauvinistic arrogance, goes ahead with the idea, believing it is right because “everyone does it…” (note connections to The Visit)

99) The muting of women’s voices as significant perspectives on communal and national issues is emphasized through Anowa’s silencing when she attempts to persuade Kofi to abandon his quest to trade in humans. Kofi responds to her outrage by interrogating her authority, asking: “Who are you to tell me what I must do or not do?” and “Besides, you are only talking like a woman”, suggesting that her gender denies her a voice or right to speak or challenge such traditions.

100) Since the explanations of Anowa’s final act (suicide) rest in the opposed interpretations of The-Mouth-That-Eats-Salt-And-Pepper, we must sort through all these possibilities to understand Anowa’s death and, by extension, the meaning of her unusual life as an early embodiment of Aidoo’s image of the woman artist. The Old Man and Old Woman designated by The-Mouth-That-Eats-Salt-And-Pepper function as representative spokes-people of the community and also as intermediary readers/viewers reading the play and Anowa and allowing us to do a double reading of the text and of their responses to the text and Anowa’s life.

101) The name “Being-The-Mouth-That-Eats-Salt-And-Pepper” is a local euphemism for a gossip, further underlining how they represent society’s opinion

102) The Old Woman, like the other women in the play, represents female conservatism and acceptance of the cultural limitations on their power. Consequently, she and the others are enraged by Anowa whose unorthodoxy and self-determination threatens social stability, especially patriarchal authority. Like most destructive characters of the folk tradition, the Old Woman looks her part of the typical village gossip. She “is wizened, leans on a stick, and her voice is raspy with asthma and a lifetime of putting her mouth into other people’s affairs.”

103) The Old Man places the blame for Anowa’s tragedy directly upon society: “It is men who make me mad. Who knows if Anowa would have been a better woman, a better person if we had not been what we are?” His position is fairer to Aidoo’s heroine than the condemnation of his female counterpart, in that he recognizes the limitations that society can inflict upon an individual, significantly, in this case, an imaginative woman.

104) Women like Badua and The Old Woman operate in manners that delimit rather than foster female personhood. Their motives derive from ideological positions which, like patriarchal ideology, are manipulative and obsessed with power over and control of others

105) Contrary to what critics say, namely that Aidoo demonizes males and depicts females in appealing light, she does not cast females only in nurturing roles but also delineates their corroboration of patriarchy’s hegemony. In Anowa, females like Badua and The Old Woman acquire notoriety on account of their support of patriarchal ideologies of gender. In the end, they become the strongest proponents of patriarchy and gender oppression through their support of Kofi Ako in his struggle to dominate Anowa, and acquire validation within the masculinist bourgeois context of success and its concomitant domestication of the female. Badua and the Old Woman legitimize patriarchy’s construction of female ingenuity. In fact, they are directly responsible both for the demise of Anowa and for what Kofi Ako ultimately becomes: the epitome of patriarchy, visibly surrounded by the indices of power and material success acquired through the ruthless exploitation of human flesh.

106) There are no nurturing grandmothers to intervene in mother-daughter fall-outs; daughters brand mothers witches; mothers produce children they are left impotent to save from the clutches of the enslaver and his dehumanizing atrocities; women become agents of patriarchal oppression, condoning the victimization of other women and supporting patriarchal ideology. Badua and Anowa have a relationship befitting rivals, not mother and daughter; and The Old Woman from the Mouth-That-Eats-Salt-And-Pepper, contrary to the harmonizing image of the grandmother, images rupture. She leads the crusade to persecute Anowa.

107) In the couple, the Old Woman represents traditional society and sees the tragedy as a result of Anowa’s disobedience. The Old Man, on the other hand, is a more progressive voice and seems to be the voice of wisdom and understanding.

108) Unexpected - The Old Woman is very critical of Anowa and the choices she makes, while the Old Man is more sympathetic.

109) The-Mouth-That-Eats-Salt-And-Pepper function as a sort of Greek chorus, which clear connections to Man 1-4 in The Visit

110) Aidoo also uses the traditional structure of oral tales which consist of an introduction, the plot, and a conclusion (like The Visit). Her use of a prologue to begin the play is a conscious imitation of the traditional oral literary structure in which a narrator or a chorus begins by setting the scene and the time in which the story occurs, introducing the main characters and foreshadowing the main themes of the tale.

111) The Old Man seems to fulfill the role of narrator. He begins and ends the play which gives it a cyclical movement, characteristic of much of oral literature.

112) Aidoo has demonstrated a dual, yet synthesizing, interest in the moral function of Ghanaian orature and the woman artist’s role in continuing this tradition. She insists, “all the art of the speaking voice could be brought back so easily. We are not that far removed from our traditions.”

113) In fact, Aidoo ruptures the oppressor/victim dichotomy characteristic of liberal feminist theorizing of mothering by demonstrating “that agency and victimhood are not mutually exclusive for victims are also agents who can change their lives and affect other lives in radical ways.”

114) Anowa’s childlessness represents an assertion of agency, the conscious curbing of a function to arrest its misappropriation. Badua identifies motherhood as the key to her daughter’s attainment of full personhood; nonetheless, her aspirations do not negate all other roles but that of procreating for her daughter.

115) It is not so much that Anowa is unable to conceive but rather that her children have been stolen from her – she is barren because the slave trade has metaphorically robbed her of her fertility, the fertility of Africa, by selling it to other parts of the world. Likewise, Kofi’s impotence can be seen as the result of his selling off his own people for materialistic gain.

116) Contemplating the young twin slaves, Panyin-na-Kakra, fanning Kofi Ako’s empty throne-like chair, Anowa soliloquizes that not reproducing is an act of mercy, for the blatant abuse of the fruits of human labor should not be condoned but resisted. In a dysfunctional world that offers one’s progeny no hope save debasement, childlessness becomes a blessing when juxtaposed to the curse of losing one’s children to slavery.

117) Through Anowa, Aidoo plays tribute to the industry and ingenuity of our foremothers. In fact, the story of Anowa, symbolically, mirrors patriarchy’s maneuvers to erode women’s effective participation in the global economy. Notably, in the play, Kofi Ako comes to dominate the trading and commercial enterprise he establishes with Anowa. Even though Anowa is the brain behind the business, Kofi eventually runs her out, vetoing her participation so that he can freely exploit slave labor to build an economic empire. Therefore, while much attention has been given to the issue of limited opportunities for women, and to Anowa’s barrenness as a tragedy, the crux of the issue in Anowa is the politics of dispossession – that is, the disenfranchisement resulting from the patriarchy’s systematic eroding of maternal agency, be it through husbands vetoing their wives’ resignation from the public sphere of work, or ruthless, power-hungry men like Kofi making slaves of women’s children.

118) SETTING: In Phase Two, not the interchange between Kofi Ako and Anowa in that unencumbered territory, the highway. Significantly, it is on the highway – that uncircumscribed, fluid space – that crucial negotiations of identity are located. It is the site of possibility as well as foreclosure. It is on the highway we see Anowa the happiest and the freest. It is also the site at which the crucial issues that govern her marital life and systematically dispossesses her are unearthed. The raging storm which frames the couple’s encounter on the highway presages the stormy gender relations that await their settlement in their new home on the coast.

119) In Anowa, homelessness, exile, not-belonging, are multiply images as both dispossession and resistance. Having sworn never to return to her natal home, Kofi Ako asking her to leave, renders her homeless, with nowhere to go.

120) The setting of Anowa is 19th century colonial Ghana, to which the writer turns in part to challenge long-standing myths about African womanhood. The most stubborn of these myths – that African femininity is congenitally passive – is debunked by the heroine’s spontaneous and ample spirit of rebellion.

121) NOTE settings: The action of the play takes places in three distinct phases. In phase one, Anowa’s action is confined to the village of Yebi, primarily to the cottage of Badua and Osam. There is a brief return to the cottage in phase two, which mostly takes place on a highway near the coast several years after phase one. The final phase is set a few years later in Oguaa at Kofi Ako’s big house built with the riches of his trade.

122) The first phase is in the indigenous home, a sharp contrast to the home of Anowa and Kofi is phase three which is built with obvious British influence. Kofi and Anowa become weaker as they lose touch with their past.

123) In the play, home is a place of disorientation and social conformity. It is not a comfortable or safe space for Anowa. Anowa is freest in the deliberate center of the play which is located paradoxically in a borderland, frontiered space, a highway. She is first constricted in her village where gender politics enforce female subordination. She is further enclosed in the “Big House” which her husband acquires. This “Big House” becomes an external reference for the entrenchment of colonial power and male dominance. It is also the site of final resistance for Anowa.

124) Aidoo’s stage directions suggest possibly ending the play “with the final exit of Anowa”, a choice which erases her suicide to refocus the finale on her closing words, “it matters not what the wise ones say, for now, I am wiser than they”. What earth-shaking truths has Anowa unearthed in the end that she dons herself the repository of wisdom? The answer, I submit, lies in the experience of living. Having lived her life, she comes to possess more knowledge about the affairs of her life than anybody else, legitimating her ideals and beliefs. Rejecting victim status, she fights viciously to reclaim her personhood when her husband decides to cast her away. She rejects the role of the reasonable woman who will settle for the best she can get out of a bad situation and refuses to leave quietly, to condone his dispossession of her. Furthermore, she involves the community of slaves in her resistance of victimization, an act which re-inscribes her as an age of revolution, mobilizing the dispossessed to strike their oppressor down. It is no accident that in the end, she openly declares Kofi Ako impotent, holding him responsible for their childlessness. His impotence signifies patriarchal attempts to sabotage maternal agency through dehumanizing the product of female productivity. Hence, his identification as the enslaver who appropriates the female womb for his own benefit. In this ending, the emphasis is on Anowa as the agent of resistance as well as wisdom. She declares herself wiser than the people she is expected to look to for advice. The earth-shaking truths Anowa learns are inspired by her personal life. Having lived with a man who, by succumbing to the pressures of patriarchal attributes of masculinity, is transformed from a gentle, fun-loving, kind and companionable mate into a power-hungry despot, Anowa arrives at the realization that the slave-owning psyche must issue from a deep internalization of impotence. Those who are not productive often derive a perverse pleasure from erasing evidence of other people’s productiveness. Kofi Ako, being impotent, grows nothing; he cannot contribute to the regeneration process. Instead, he functions as an agent of dehumanization; he diminishes human agency through exploitation. Anowa’s final declaration is that Kofi Ako “is a corpse. He is dead wood. But less than dead wood because at least that sometimes grows mushrooms.” Though harrowing, this statement poignantly mirrors the absolute absence of identification one must cultivate in order to be able to exploit others so unfeelingly. In the play, Aidoo shrewdly introduces her young heroine as “a young woman who grows up”. Growing up for Anowa brings with it the realization of the dispiriting process that the transformation from woman to wife entails.

125) Note Anowa stating, “I hear too many noises in my head and you must come back before my mind flies and gets lost” has obvious connections to Willy Loman and Blanche DuBois.

126) Anowa underscores the similarities between the slave trade occurring in the Gold Coast (as Ghana was then known) in that time period and the treatment of women in contemporary society. Some believe Anowa is feminist, while others focus on the economic or moral aspects. [allegory]

127) The play reveals the complicity of Africans in the slave trade, notes the cover-up in terms of silence.

128) Much of the plot of Anowa turns on the power of custom and tradition, and the consequences of not following such tenets of society. Anowa does not subscribe to most customs. She has refused to marry after reaching puberty, as is tradition in her area. Further, she has turned down every man who asked for her hand for six years.

129) The driving force behind Anowa’s actions is pride. Though her attitudes and behavior might seem wild, strange, or just bizarre to those around her, Aidoo gives Anowa a moral, self-respecting center. Anowa does not care much what people thing.

130) One technique of the playwright is monologues that revel motivations and depth to the characterizations. Another technique within each of the three phases are transitions between smaller scenes that make up the phase. The transitions consist of the lighting going down, then rising again. The transitions denote passage of time. These transitions make the action of the play more continuous and make its staging clearer.

131) Lyrical and eloquent, Anowa brings us a typical Aidoo heroine, strong and nonconformist, but ultimately felled by conservative forces.

132) Anowa’s bleak tones present the breakdown of human relationships, a breakdown that may not be salvaged unless we listen, as the Old Man advises, to the cries and dreams of the embattled heart. (connect with Streetcar)

133) What comes through in Aidoo’s play is that the issues of gender oppression are materially based, that the dominant social relations that arise are part of the economic production relations of a given society, at a particular historical moment, produce specific modes of behavior or cultural practices. These practices may not be the result of deliberate or malicious intent by individuals in that society. But neither is it one’s destiny to accept cultural practices that one finds abhorrent or counterproductive.

134) The play is built around male-female relationships, implicitly contrasting different generations. In Anowa there are three main couplings: The Old Man and Old Woman, the elder generation; Badua and Osam, the parental generation; and Anowa and Kofi Ako, the younger generation.

135) Badua and Osam, Anowa’s parents, share many characteristics with the Old Man and Old Woman, Badua is quick to judge as the Old Woman, while her husband is depicted as more thoughtful, like the Old Man.

136) Indeed most of Badua’s mental energy is spent on wanting her daughter to be a different kind of person, one that accepts her societal role and lives the kind of life her mother wants her to live.

137) The bulk of Anowa concerns the relationship between Anowa and Kofi Ako. In many ways, it is the exact opposite of the previous couples discussed. While Anowa is outspoken in her opinions, as Badua and the Old Woman are, she has a certain strength and independence that they do not. Anowa does not have regard for social norms, as she shows over and over again. She did not marry when most girls on her culture did, and turned down many suitors…

138) Aidoo portrays male-female relationships in a complex, thought-provoking manner. Each of these three couples has a different kind of relationship, in part because of their different ages, experiences, and life expectations.

139) The play filters the tragedy of African slavery through a striking prism, showing how it becomes a curse not only for slaves but also their enslavers.

140) Ama Ata Aidoo has since the publication of her first play in 1964/5 been an important and vocal figure in the struggle for Ghanaian national liberation and self-determination in the context of colonialism and neo-colonialism, as well as the broader pan-Africanist struggles against imperialism and racism generally; at the same time she has been an outspoken proponent for women’s liberation in the national and international contexts and an avid critic of the corruption and hypocrisy of the national bourgeoisie in post-independence Ghana.

141) Aidoo portrays a sort of symbolic history of events which forces her audience to reflect on contemporary social issues.

142) Symbolically the story of the play mirrors its historical context, in that it shows Kofi Ako as the Fanti Trader, symbolizing the rise of a slave-owning and dealing Fanti bourgeoisie whose class interests are aligned with British imperialism, and who sacrifices his fellow men through slavery and eventually his own manhood to accumulate wealth. (connect consequences of materialistic pursuit in DOAS and The Visit)

143) At the beginning of phase three, Kofi Ako’s entrance is preceded by a procession singing or reciting a song of praise about him. This is accompanied by music and dancing and is very similar to tradition songs of praise. Aidoo, however, uses this oral tradition to demonstrate the complicity of the procession in Kofi Ako’s immorality and shows the way in which oral traditions can be used to portray a glorified image of wealth and power in a way that masks the brutality, greed and materialistic values upon which these are based.

144) Rather than blame Kofi for working with the white colonizers in trade and acquiring slaves and rejecting him for having helped in consolidating colonial domination; he (The Old Man) portrays it as a much larger social phenomenon and claims Kofi’s faults as the community’s.

145) Anowa is a highly symbolic play.

146) Aidoo’s dramatic transformation of the popular West African folktale gives us a slice of Ghanaian life, and lovingly embraces its audience through its entertainment and its enduring message that no one ought to be a slave.

147) One critic points out that Anowa has been marginalized by what she calls the “politics of exclusion”” that prevails in the constructed binaries of “masculinity/femininity, sanity/insanity, home/exile, center/margin, witch/priestess.” Not withstanding this “politics of exclusion,” it is not easy to defy the gravity of Aidoo’s work which “conveys her social vision, her commitment to write and her belief in reworking the traditions to create a more integrated African society. Her outspokenness toward male dominance in African countries has earned her a rather antagonistic response from some male critics.”

148) The story of Anowa is the story of an entire community (like The Visit), which Aidoo historically and politically grounds by opening her play with a reference to the Bond of 1844. The bond signifies the official beginning of the era of British imperialism.

149) Anowa’s silence is not the silence of a ghost that can be exorcised upon its return to the village, for Anowa’s difference is always already there in the music of the atenteben ‘wailing in loneliness’, haunting her community, even when – especially when – she is absent. In that sense, she will certainly have to say something about that; for she has already spoken the unspeakable, releasing silence in a disruptive way that does not let her community be comfortable in its forgetfulness.

150) The drama clearly shows the connection between sexual oppression and colonial domination.

151) Anowa (the character) is driven by a desire to make her mark, to reproduce her self on her own terms, and a love which allows her to see the potential for good in this “watery male” (Kofi). Ironically, Anowa’s success in realizing her goals precipitates the very conditions that are detrimental to the healthful articulation and reproduction of her self. Thus we see the linkages between the young couple’s increasing prosperity, the rising economic and ideological influence of the British merchants, and the growing marginalization of African women, exemplified by the character of Anowa. Her consequent regression from the confident, sane, and hard-working woman to an uninspired martial ornament on the brink of insanity and suicide, is graphically link to Kofi Ako’s internalization of European attitudes about women, matrimony, and the acquisition of wealth and power.

152) Aidoo positions Anowa as a figure who disrupts the very foundations on which patriarchal dominance depends.

153) Anowa’s resistance to Kofi Ako, who, as the stage directions say, is dressed and decorated in the trappings of conquest and surrounded by all the material evidence of his trading success, is located historically and in terms of class hierarchies. Anowa, by contrast, is described as wearing old clothes and is barefooted. (COSTUMING)

154) Kofi and Anowa build a business “trading skins” – obviously a metaphor for the selling of the “skins” of Africans in slavery

155) By the end of the play, Anowa in a sense becomes a symbol of Africa, her destruction representing its conquest and the ensuing breakdown of the morality, spirituality and strength of African society. This is particularly evident in Anowa’s dream which she recounts after remembering her questioning of Nana about the white colonizers. In this dream, Anowa identifies with Africa, her body becoming the African continent.

156) At one point, we have Anowa recounting to the reader a story told to her by her grandmother, Nana, wherein the “truth” is revealed as to how “the pale men” came to own Africans. It ends, “No one talks of these things anymore. All good men and women try to forget; they have forgotten!” Anowa reclaims those who have been “forgotten,” those dispersed Africans and names them her own. She becomes mother [Africa] and the mo[u]ther of unspeakable things. Just as she is named witch – one with a power to haunt, one associating with a haunting visionary power – she awakens the ghosts from the past, gives voice to the silenced cries to those whose bodies were torn asunder and not lie under the waters of the middle passage. When Anowa goes to sleep that night she dreams that she, like Africa, gave birth to the men and women who were captured into slavery.

157) Nana’s speech references the symbolic forts which haunt the coastline of Ghana. These “big houses” as they are called remain as reminders of what Aidoo refers to as a “bigger crime” in which the people of the land played the game of “dipping with the stranger.”

158) Anowa’s nightmare (of birthing and giant lobsters) is imbued with metaphors of power, conquest and domination, empire and colony. The nightmare is symbolic and is framed as Anowa’s reconstruction of the story of Africa’s fragmentation as a result of foreign intrusion into the continent. In the dream, Anowa becomes a metaphor for “Mother Africa”, whose children are being subjugated, torn, and dispersed globally. Like mother Africa, Anowa experiences the anguish of watching helplessly while her children are destroyed or dispersed. This dispersion and the subsequent emergence of African children worldwide in Anowa’s dream is represented as a “bursting, as of a ripe tomato or a pod”. While it is true that this dispersal led to the emergence of African cultures and people in the diaspora, it also suggests a destruction of the originating culture – the ripe “mother tomato” or “mother Africa” as well as the rupturing of African female “subjects” under slavery and colonial domination. The image of Mother Africa which Aidoo evokes is not idealized or idolized; rather, it is all too close to the lived reality of many African women who are marginalized, physically and psychically abused and exploited. In conflating Anowa and Mother Africa, Aidoo endows her character with the collective consciousness or mythic memory of her people, heightening Anowa’s significance, as female subjectivity, in the remembering, as in putting together and recollecting, of Africa’s history. Therefore, symbolically, through Anowa’s remembering, Africa as female subjectivity remembers “herself”. Also, like Africa, Anowa is haunted by the scars of a past whose memory she has repressed, although it is continually activated by events in the present. Also, notice that Anowa’s nightmare weaves together images of pregnancy and violent birthing.

159) Also, in the play, “the voices of an unseen wearied multitude” sing the spiritual “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot” on stage after Anowa tells her tale of horror. The song is a call for liberation. It calls for both spiritual and physical flight from bondage to a paradise. For colonized Africans, it is a call for freedom from colonial domination, and for diasporic Africans (in slavery/bondage), the song suggests hope of both physical and psychic liberation.

160) Paradoxically, the maternal image that leaves a lasting impression in Anowa is that of the slave mother, poignantly imagined by Anowa in her dream and imaged through her body giving birth to children who are seized, dashed to the ground, and stamped upon to burst like ripe tomatoes. Given the young Anowa’s “pre-memory” of slavery, her failure to have children takes on the form of female resistance to expropriation of the female womb in the perpetuation of gender oppression. Since women are the reproducers and producers of the human body politic, abuses of women’s reproductive agency should be met with women withholding their ability to reproduce.

161) Kofi never really understood his wife, only what society expected a wife to be. – Agree?

162) Anowa’s free-spirited ways were never appreciated by anyone in this play. – Agree?

163) The play ends in tragedy, which should teach young ladies a lesson about marrying against their parents’ wishes – Agree?

164) While Anowa has remained true to her beliefs, her attitude has harmed those around her. – Agree?

165) Men in Aidoo’s fiction are mere shadows or voices, just “fillers”. Somewhat, quietly, they seem to be manipulating the women’s life or negatively controlling it or simply having a good time, knowing that they are assured of something like a dive top-dog position in life. – AGREE (connect to role of women in Miller’s play)?

SOME GHANA BACKGROUND

➢ The Bond Treaty of 1844 reveals the complicity of Africans in the slave trade, notes the cover-up in terms of silence. As the Grandmother says that everyone has forgotten, she encourages Anowa to forget also.

➢ The bond of 1844 which is referred to was a group of separate but connected treaties that legalized the imposition of the British legal system throughout Fantiland, and promised British protection to the Fanti signatories in the event of aggression from the Ashanti, one of the most important enemies of the British and the Fanti. Thirty years later, in 1874, at the time the play is set, the British defeated the Ashanti, and established the British crown colony of the Gold Coast.

➢ Until 1957, Ghana was a colony of Great Britain. Ghana became the first African country south of the Sahara desert to become independent.

A SMALL LIST OF THEMES

❖ Quests of self-exploration

❖ The difficulty of finding a path out of the quagmire of neocolonialism and imperialism

❖ See Aidoo as a “diaspora storyteller”

❖ The silence of history regarding why and how Africans came to be displaced and dispersed across the globe

❖ History and the healing of historical fractures

❖ The failure of many people to really listen to one another

❖ Focus upon women and their struggle to achieve a voice

❖ The deteriorization of a relationship as wealth increases

❖ Could call the play: “resistance postmodern”

❖ NOTE - Two well-known slogans of the women’s movement: “the personal is political” and “women’s rights are human rights” – relate to this text

AN INTRO TO POSTCOLONIAL WRITING ISSUES (the Africa – African American links)

What is Africa to me:

Copper sun, or scarlet sea,

Jungle star or jungle track,

Strong bronzed men or regal black

Women from whose loins I sprang

When the birds of Eden sang?

One three centuries removed

From the scenes his father loved,

Spicy grove, cinnamon tree,

What is Africa to me?

- Countee Cullen, “Heritage”

• The final four lines stress the disconnected connectedness, a struggle for a consciousness of place. The speaker accepts that there is an ancestral connection, partri- and matrilineal, but ponders how that connection should be continued, reestablished, represented, if you will, in the present, and maintained.

• The selection from Cullen’s poem makes literarily manifest W.E.B. DuBois’ “double consciousness.” Cullen asks, in the first line of the poem, “What is Africa to me?” The “me” in this context is the Negro, black American, now African American. Cullen’s poem captures the sentiment of approximately 150 years of black American psychological and cultural struggle.

• DuBois argued that each race was “striving, each in their own way, to develop for civilization its particular message, its particular ideal”. For example, “The Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with a second sight in this American world … It is a peculiar sensation, this double consciousness … One ever feels his twoness, -- an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.”

• The development of diaspora consciousness, then, requires that the black American and the African separately, but in relation to each other merge their double self into a better and truer self. In this merging they wish neither of the older selves to be lost.

• In Aidoo’s first play, Dilemma of a Ghost, the ghost in the play’s title refers to the haunting and silent history of African involvement in the slave trade. The ghost read this way initiates a conversation which hopefully can expose the lack of information and understanding that Africans and African Americans have of one another. Ato (main character) can serve as a potential bridge spanning the Middle passage, for he is the only character who has made a life on both sides of the Atlantic.

• To DuBois, the Negro must reconcile his Negroness/Africanness with is Americanness, know both selves so as to merge them and become a better self.

• NOTE – the “Afro-American is nearly an invisible man” in the literature of Africans. Few African writers had even mentioned anything about Africans in the diaspora; Aidoo, however, holds a singular distinction – that of being a major African author who has made this subject of Africans and/in the diaspora a central issue.

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