Emerging Perspectives on Ama Ata Aidoo (review)

This is a comprehensive collection of essays, commentaries, and memorabilia on Ama Ata Aidoo, the versatile and significant female Ghanaian writer. In the past four decades Aidoo has consistently, diligently, and interestingly explored her society through stories, poetry, drama, and essays. In terms of recognition, the publication of Vincent Odamtten's The Art of Ama Ata Aidoo: Polylectics and Readings against Neocolonialism (Gainesville: UP of Florida, c1994) and the essays collected in the present volume indicate an appropriate acknowledgment of a major African writer. It is this same recognition that should be accorded more African writers—male and female—who have in their various creative productions widened the intellectual and literary horizon on African literatures. It is about time, too, that the scholars producing critical studies engage in intellectual interrogations with the corpus of an individual writer's works in order to make proper assessments and not assumptions.

Apart from the introductory essay (xv-xxviii) and the two-part "Conversations with Aidoo" (429-55) authored by Ada Azodo, the two editors (Azodo and Wilentz) collected twenty-one essays on the various aspects of Aidoo's creativity. This collection follows in the tradition of the pathbreaking Emerging Perspectives on Buchi Emecheta and Emerging Perspectives on Flora Nwapa edited by Marie Umeh. Perhaps it is equally appropriate that the Emerging Perspectives series should commence with the studies of women writers, but even established writers need to be re-examined in the context of emerging perspectives, considering that ideas are in constant motion as they reinvent themselves.

Part one of the book, entitled "Writing Back: Aidoo's Critical Voice," has two essays, one by Wilentz and another by Ama Ata Aidoo. "Reading the Critical Writer" by Wilentz (3-10) is a restatement of Aidoo's position, interestingly articulated in her famous essays disseminated through Ernest Emenyonu, who invited her to Calabar in 1980 to participate at his well-attended annual International Conference on African Literature and the English Language. Thus the republication of Aidoo's "Unwelcome Pals and Decorative Slaves or Glimpses of Women as Writers and Characters in Contemporary African Literature" in this volume (11-24) re-emphasizes those issues that prompted the production of this Emerging Perspective volume as well as the intrinsic resentment accorded women's writing decades ago. The essay is somewhat dated and some aspects of Aidoo's personal grouse have been overtaken by events, but it ultimately portrays the problems that sensitive writers, especially women writers, encounter. She concludes succinctly that "what is clear, though, is that right now, over and above all the other [problems] we share with our brothers, we suffer these aspects of being-yes-an oppressed section of society; if not always, sometimes, as women only" (22). This essay sets the tone for many of the contributions in this book.

In the volume, Angeletta K. M. Gourdine situates Aidoo's works in the context of "slavery in the diaspora consciousness" (27-44), a sensitive issue, considering the consequences of Henry Louis Gates, Jr.'s film production. Gourdine, however, concludes that Aidoo is "furiously working to raise a historically and politically charged diaspora consciousness" because "the black world as she imagines it, lived and textual, requires a space for pasts, presents and futures to face one another" (41). Complementing that essay is Mildred A. Hill-Lubin's "Ama Ata Aidoo and the African Diaspora" (45-60), which perceives the poems in Someone Talking to Sometime as inspirational within and across cultures. There is no doubt that Ama Ata Aidoo creatively engages in the discussion of the salient issues associated with Africa and the African diaspora. It is through this creative focus that she carves a literary niche and widens the horizon on international relationships.

Essays by Maureen Eke ("Diasporic Ruptures and [Re]membering History," 61-78) and Gay Wilentz ("The Politics of Exile," 79-92) on the exile theme intellectually expand the understanding...