Ama Ata Aidoo (1942–2023)

I loved the stories and the way they explored culture! Not going to lie, I struggled a bit with the play format since I don't read it all that often. I would absolutely love to see these performed! I managed to find a recording of one and a reading of the other online after reading the book and they definitely added to my experience, even if they weren't super high resolution or anything - I definitely feel like plays hit so much harder when you actually experience them. I can only imagine how powerful these must be if you are in the audience.… (més)

I stumbled on this among my grandmother's books - what a treasure. So I had been meaning to read it this year after I found it, then heard shortly after that that Ama Ata Aidoo had passed. So then I DEFINITELY had to get around to reading it. I am a short story collection reader! This is a great one! Aidoo writes about Ghana and now this collection is over 50 years old. But it's still a great one to pick up. Some things might go over my head, but that is understandable, I haven't read much from Ghana or even from the 1970s? But wow, this must have been fresh stuff 50 years ago! It still seems so.… (més)

156/2020. This is a social realist novel about a middle class urban Ghanaian woman who falls out of marriage and into love, with all the consequences for herself and her extended family, told from an African feminist perspective. The author manages to be both sharply perceptive and amusingly witty without sacrificing realistic portrayal. It's also freer in form than traditional European novels, with more influence from oral culture and West African conversational style. Thoroughly enjoyable.

Quotes

I'm laughing so hard: "years of having a clever woman in his home and an unbroken chain of rather stupid heads of department at his place of work had taught him not to take anything for granted in a discussion."

LMAO: "Indeed the only opinion Musa Musa could possibly have shared with African heads of state is that any discussion of mortality is treason and punishable, by death of course, if the circumstances are right."

Grandma on marriage and society: "[...] remember a man always gained in stature through any way he chose to associate with a woman. And that included adultery. Especially adultery. Esi, a woman has always been diminished in her association with a man. A good woman was she who quickened the pace of her own destruction. To refuse, as a woman, to be destroyed, was a crime that society spotted very quickly and punished swiftly and severely."
[...]
"Life on this earth need not always be some humans being gods and others being sacrificial animals. Indeed, that can be changed."

On adaptive traditions: "All the spirits should have been appeased: ancient coastal and Christian, ancient northern and Islamic, the ghost of the colonisers."… (més)

This is a fiery book. The main character, “our sister” or Sissie for short, travels from Ghana to Europe, and comments on her life as “the african woman” amongst the white natives.

The portions set in Bavaria and London are the angriest: Sissie is deeply, intensely angered at the natives’ patronizing attitudes (intentional or otherwise), their cluelessness, their rationalizations, their happiness, the size of German food portions, the juicy plums that are so delicious. It’s an anger stemming from centuries of injustice that lashes out and that is confused in settling on targets but that is too wild and too real and too just to be anything else.

The final portion of the book, a letter to an ex-lover, I felt was the best part of the book. It’s where Sissie’s anger is turned on African immigrants whose post facto justifications for not helping the mother country is infuriating to her. This section, too, is confused and not always reasonable, but it provides more of an explanation for why Sissie feels the way she does, and that explicit insight into a deeply angry person’s motivations unlocks an appreciation for the character that wasn’t there for me in the earlier parts.

Dealing with centuries of systematic oppression is not an easy thing to do: no-one who proclaims a simple solution comes off looking good. Very nicely done!… (més)