Changes (29 page)

The admission of Chinua Achebe's
Things Fall Αρart
(1958) into the “Oxbridge” canon at Legon gave Aidoo's artistic confidence a significant boost.
¹⁹
“[When I read
Things Fall Αρart
I said, ‘Oh, so? He can do this,'”
²⁰
that is, retrieve and re-affirm African cultural identity. The novel's genuine attempt to reconstruct Africa's battered colonial image provided a potent stimulus as Aidoo began to contemplate the contours of her own fictional landscape. The anti-feminist attitudes of British professors at Legon may also have helped to sharpen Aidoo's artistic resolve. In English courses, for example, her essays were frequently defaced by outright misogynist comments, such as “Excellent but for feminine carelessness” or “Superior work except for female shoddiness.” Small wonder, then, that women constitute a major force in her work. Interrogating male mythologies of female subjectivity is one of Aidoo's well-defined artistic goals.

Commitment to social change has engendered in Aidoo a tremendous versatility. Adding to an array of literary credentials—poet, dramatist, novelist, and essayist—are her roles as university professor, politician, and mother. In 1968 and 1969 she taught simultaneously in the School of Drama at the University of Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, and in the English Department of the University of Kenya in Nairobi. Her tenure as Coordinator of the African Literature Programat Cape Coast lasted for ten years (1972 to 1982). During 1974 and 1975, she served as a consulting professor in the Ethnic Studies Program at Xavier University in New Orleans. Other academic posts include Fulbright Scholar- in-Residence to the Great Lakes Colleges Association in 1988 and Writer-in-Residence at the University of Richmond, Virginia, in 1989.

From 1972 to 1979, Aidoo held directorships at the Ghana Broadcasting Corporation, the Arts Council of Ghana, and the Medical and Dental Council. This period of social activism culminated in her appointment as Minister of Education in 1982. A year later, she left her post and, after a brief visit to France, went to live in Zimbabwe as a fulltime writer. The goal of uninterrupted creativity, however, proved difficult. While
Changes
and the radio play from which it originates were written in Zimbabwe, her creative work has had to compete with other commitments, such as teaching and working with the Zimbabwean Women's Writers' Union, the Ministry of Education, and women's tie-dye groups. Thus Aidoo remains steeped in African cultural life, which she, in turn, weaves into a rich tapestry
of art.

“[My] daughter, Kinna, has also influenced my writing,” Aidoo admits to an interviewer.
²¹
A graduate of Smith College where she majored in Chemistry, Kinna Likimani was born in 1969 to Aidoo and Ernest Parsali Likimani, a noted Kenyan biochemist, who died in 1980. Kinna's effect on her mother's art extends far beyond the series of poems dedicated to her in
Someone Talking to Sometime.
A vision of the world she will inherit, if gender and cultural domination go unchecked, drives Aidoo's creative imagination. “I have no right to pessimism. There are powerful forces undermining progress in Africa. But one must never underestimate the power of the people to bring about change.”
²²
Nor can we afford to underestimate Aidoo's own power as an agent of change.
²³

       
Notes

1
. See “Routine Drugs I” in
Someone Talking to Sometime,
p. 61. Professor Eldred Durosimi Jones, to whom the poem is dedicated, made the remark.

2
. Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar refer to the “literary paternity” of Anglo-American literature. See
The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), p. 9.

3
. Recent critical texts on African women's writing include
Ngambika: Studies of Women in African Literature,
edited by Carol Boyce-Davies and Ann Adams Graves (Trenton, N.J.: Africa World Press, 1986);
Journeys Through the French African Novel,
by Mildred Mortimer (London: Heinemann, 1990);
Motherlands: Black Womens Writing from Africa, the Caribbean and South Asia,
edited by Susheila Nasta (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1992);
Moorings and Metaphors: Figures of Culture and Gender in Black Womens Literature,
by Karla C. Holloway (New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers University Press, 1992); and
Binding Cultures: Black Women Writers in Africa and the Diaspora,
by Gay Wilentz (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992). For the view that regards feminism as antithetical to African femininity, see Katherine Frank's “Feminist Criticism and the African Novel” in
African Literature Today
14 (1984).

4
. See Aidoo's essay, “To Be an African Woman Writer—An Overview and a Detail.”

5
. Quoted in
Changing the Story: Feminist Fiction and the Tradition,
by Gayle Greene (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991), p. 13.

6
. Other women writers of this period include Efua Sutherland (Ghana), Flora Nwapa (Nigeria), Grace Ogot (Kenya), Bessie Head (South Africa), Assia Djebar (Algeria), and Rebecca Njau (Kenya).

7
. See
A Room of One's Own
(New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1929), pp. 37-38.

8
. The quotation is Jane Gallop's. See “Snatches of Conversation” in
Women and Language in Literature and Society,
edited by Sally
McConnell-Ginet, et al. (New York: Praeger, 1980), p. 274.

9
. For another examination of female friendship in African women's writing, see
So Long a Letter
by Mariama BS (London: Heinemann, 1989).

10
. Virginia Woolfs mirror metaphor conjures up a similar idea. See
A Room of One's Own
, p. 35.

11
. February 5,1993 interview with me in Clinton, New York.

12
. See the frontispiece to
Someone Talking to Sometime
.

13
. See James,
In Their Own Voices,
pp. 13 and 19. In the February interview Aido cited as an example of her mother's keen political mind her concern over American supply of corn to the military government that overthrew Kwame Nkrumah.

14
. An equivalent for this Akan word is “chief,” which Aidoo puts in the same category of negative colonial terms as “tribe.”

15
. Paramount chief is the English equivalent.

16
. February 5,1993 interview.

17
. February 5,1993 interview.

18
. February 5,1993 interview.

19
. “Oxbridge” is a conflation of Oxford and Cambridge. Colleges and universities in England's former colonies remained loyal to the English curriculum. See
Decolonising the Mind: The Politics of Language in African Literature,
NgugT wa Thiong'o (London: Heinemann, 1986).

20
. See
African Writers Talking,
edited by Cosmo Pieterese and Dennis Duerden (New York: Africana Publishing, 1972), p. 26.

21
. See In Their Own Voices, p. 19.

22
. February 5,1993 interview.

23
. The Art of Ama Ata Aidoo,
by Vincent O. Odamtten, the first complete study of Aidoo's works, will be published in December 1993 by The University of Florida Press, Gainesville.

       
Works Cited

Aidoo, Ama Ata.
The Dilemma of a Ghost and Naowa.
Harlow, England: Longman, 1965.

____ .
No Sweetness Here.
Harlow, England: Longman, 1970.

____ .
Our Sister Killjoy Or Reflections from a Black-Eyed Squint.
London: NOK Publishers, 1979.

____ .
Someone Talking to Sometime.
Harare, Zimbabwe: The College Press, 1985.

____ . “To Be a Woman.”
Sisterhood Is Global,
ed. Robin Morgan. New York: Anchor Doubleday, 1985, 258-65.

____ . “To Be an African Woman Writer—An Overview and a Detail.”
Criticism and Ideology,
ed. Kirsten Holst Petersen.

Uppsala, Sweden: Scandinavian Institute of African Studies, 1988, 155-72.

____ . “Nowhere Cool.”
Callaloo
13, no. 1 (1990): 62-70.

____ . “The African Woman Today.”
Dissent
39 (1992): 319-25.

____ .
Changes: A Love Story.
London: The Women's Press, 1991. Emecheta, Buchi.
The Joys of Motherhood.
New York: Geoige Braziller, 1979.

Gilbert, Sandra M. and Susan Gubar.
The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination.
New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 1979.

James, Adeola.
In Their Own Voices: African Women Writers Talk.
London: Heinemann, 1990.

McConnell-Ginet, Sally, et al., eds.
Women and Language in Literature and Society.
New York: Praeger, 1980.

Minh-ha, Trinh T.
Woman, Native, Other: Writing Postcoloniality and Feminism.
Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989.

Odamtten, Vincent O.
The Art of Ama Ata Aidoo.
Gainesville: The University of Florida Press, forthcoming.

Petersen, Kirsten Holst, ed.
Criticism and Ideology.
Uppsala, Sweden: Scandinavian Institute of African Studies, 1988.

Pieterse, Cosmo, and Dennis Duerden.
African Writers Talking.
New York: Africana Publishing, 1972.

Woolf, Virginia.
A Room of One's Own.
New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1929.

       
About the Author

One of Ghana's most prominent writers,
AMA ATA AIDOO
is the author of another novel,
Our Sister Killjoy or Reflections from a Black-Eyed Squint
; a volume of short stories,
No Sweetness Here
; a play, Anowa; and a volume of poetry,
Someone Talking to Sometime
.

       
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