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 i 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 ii iii 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. iv 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. v 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 2 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 3 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).