Staging Modern Vagrancy: Female Figures of Border-crossing in Ama Ata Aidoo and Caryl Churchill

As the irruption of the consciousness of border-crossings into our present cultural analyses evinces the escalated shifting of global human geography, articulations of "nomads" as "fluid," "flexible," or "liberatory" subjects have proliferated in our humanistic studies. ² Joining the important debates resulting from such articulations, ³ this essay revisits the problem of border-crossing by examining its figurations in contemporary women authors' dramatic works. Specifically, through a reading of such figurations by Ama Ata Aidoo and Caryl Churchill, this essay sets up a critical encounter between a Ghanaian woman much ignored and an English woman much embraced in Euro-American feminist theatre studies. This juxtaposition has its linguistic and temporal justification: both Aidoo and Churchill write in English, and both are part and parcel of the cultural openings made possible by the disintegration of the British Empire in the post-World War II sea change, as Aidoo is among the prominent black writers redefining a radically transforming post-British Sub-Saharan Africa, and Churchill is among the leading English authors remaking the public scenes of the turbulent western metropolis. The focus of this essay, however, is on their distinct stagings of female figures moving across the fermenting horizons and organizing boundaries of "intertwined modern world histories," ⁴ thereby bringing forth resonations in those otherwise separate movements. ⁵

Unlike the modernist category of human mobility that has long been universalized, ⁶ female mobility is centrally felt in Aidoo's works as a specific mode of transboundary existence, featuring the homeless migrant wandering through volatile local, national, regional, and global scenes, ⁷ following a dim trail of material and/or symbolic subsistence in a "normal state of emergency." ⁸ Such a figure of the homeless migrant shaped in different ways has also appeared in Caryl Churchill's theatrical landscapes, where the shifting motions of modern capital are astutely mapped, so are the varieties of female lives compelled by and caught in those motions. ⁹ Produced in the 1970s, their works are inhabited by haunting rhythms of human displacements that are presently intensifying in all parts of the globe. Such female figures in their juxtaposed trajectories of border-crossing, then, may inform our current discussions on "nomadic subjects" and their charted or uncharted passages as we search for more ways to map or engage the conditions of a changing world, and its embattled humanity.

The Female Wayfarer

Scholars have long explored how the 1970s constitutes a juncture where the world of modern capital was convulsed with a whirlwind of structural reconfiguration. ¹⁰ Witnessing the crisis-ridden negotiations among the industrial powers for a "new global order," ¹¹ it also saw movements for national independence in ex-colonies of the West metamorphosing under the pressures of such a new ordering into "neocolonial enslavements." ¹² Acutely aware of the political uncertainties deepening in the post-independent black continent entangled in those shifts, ¹³ Ama Ata Aidoo published her play Anowa in 1970, retelling the oral legend of a rebellious daughter and her potentially liberating border-crossing that turns out to be an ill-fated personal journey and an aborted historical project. Set in the mid-nineteenth century Gold Coast under the encroachment of European expansionism, the play "speaks modes of ideological and economic domination" that are "specific to the advent of classical colonialism" and at the same time "hails us in this age of neocolonialism" (Odamtten, 46). Situating an old legend in modern world history, Aidoo's "orature" (Odamtten, 13) stages a border-crossing humanity that had appeared in Africa's traumatic encounter with Western colonialism and was being reconstituted in the Sub-Saharan Africa of the 1970s in another turn of such encounter, thereby enacting a probing look at the past as one way of exploring the present.

As the play begins, the border-crossing stirrings in the Fanti region, a major area of the Gold...