Ama Ata Aidoo's Orphan Ghosts: African Literature and Aesthetic Postmodernity

In his essay "Orphée noir" ("Black Orpheus"), which originally prefaced the Anthologie de la nouvelle poésie nègre et malgache de langue française edited in 1948 by Léopold Sédar Senghor, Jean-Paul Sartre compares the "tireless descent into himself" attempted by the Négritude poet to "Orpheus going to claim Eurydice from Pluto" (423). Sartre further draws on this comparison by explaining that the Négritude heralded by the poets of the Anthologie disappears at the very moment that they look at it: "But if he [the poet] turns around to look squarely at his Negritude, it vanishes in smoke [. . .]" (422). Sartre's use of the figure of Orpheus—the searching, melancholy and finally dismembered poet and musician from ancient Greek mythology, ¹ highlights what is often left aside in analyses of Négritude: for political figures and poets Léopold Sédar Senghor and Aimé Césaire, Négritude is not only a multifaceted cultural notion but also a complex and fruitful aesthetic marker that points at the tight connection between Négritude and aesthetic postmodernity. Indeed, Négritude and aesthetic postmodernity are both concerned with issues of identity, alienation and disenchantment in a context of shifting personal and communal bearings as well as groundbreaking literary innovations and creative energies. ² Thus, it is no coincidence that Stéphane Mallarmé—the French poet of modernity, of "la presque disparition vibratoire"'the vibratory quasi-disappearance' (368) of words and their representations, is read by Senghor as a "negro-african" poet and is mentioned several times by Sartre in his "Orphée noir."

Such postmodern aesthetic issues are also central in the works of the Ghanaian writer Ama Ata Aidoo, who has often expressed her frustration towards reductive interpretations of her texts. In contrast to many scholars who, she writes, do not give "the full weight of their intelligence and scholarship" especially to the works of African women writers, Vincent Odamtten, in his book The Art of Ama Ata Aidoo: Polylectics and Reading against Neocolonialism, "not only gives the texts a close reading, but he also treats their contents seriously. As a result, he comes out with some extremely profound insights into the material he works on, as well as into contemporary African literature, and indeed, literature generally" (Literature 24). In his preface to The Art of Ama Ata Aidoo, Odamtten writes that his "polylectic reading" (x) of Aidoo's works "demands that the critic not only acknowledge the importance of the undergirding orature but attempt to conjoin that aesthetic to the whole critical enterprise" (x). In the spirit of Odamtten's reading, I want to focus on Aidoo's plays The Dilemma of a Ghost and Anowa to show how Aidoo, already in the early 1960s and '70s, was tackling issues relevant both to the specific conditions of African literature and to various aesthetic and ideological aspects of literary postmodernity: homelessness, exile, the loss of personal and communal bearings "in the context of shifting social, political, and ethical standards" (Odamtten 28).

The Dilemma of a Ghost (first performed in 1964) and Anowa (published in 1970), stage several characters' ghostly feelings of displacement and estrangement from their native communities. These characters, who all to a certain extent experience the consequences of Westernization, suffer from a state of melancholy fostered by their unsuccessful attempt to "return" to a place and time that should allow them both to "belong" and to start their lives anew. These characters indeed realize that no return is ever possible, and that what they try to look at by turning around always seems to be disappearing under their longing gazes. Hence, I propose to read Aidoo's wandering and exiled characters as examples of this melancholy that not only haunts postcolonial African literature in the 1960s and afterwards, but that also marks (as Walter Benjamin especially showed) the...