WOMENS' POSITIONS AND ROLES IN CONTEMPORARY GHANA IN AMA ATA AIDOO'S NOVELS

Abstract

An examination of the existing scholarship on African women writers shows that the question of negotiating the past and the present in the contemporary period is one of the crucial discussions in African women's literature. However, this negotiation is hardly dealt with as an issue that can potentially lead to the re-evaluation of women's roles and status in contemporary Africa, so as to break away from the nostalgia for pre-colonial women's images and roles and to cast a critical eye on Western imported lifestyles. As social change occurs, women's position in Africa is undergoing an ever changing redefinition especially when it is considered within the larger scope of nationalism. This is what this dissertation proposes, a re-reading of Ama Ata Aidoo's novels, through the new prism of women's roles as part of the cultural negotiation in contemporary Ghana. In doing so, the dissertation goes beyond the paradigm of binary opposition that undergirds the critical field concerning writings by African women in favour of the innovative concept of negotiation. In addressing women's issues such as marriage, polygamy and love within the broader context of nationhood and nationalism, this study puts forward the argument that Ama Ata Aidoo has devised a space of creativity for herself through an innovative aesthetic vacuum, hitherto the preserve of men, and from which she poses, discusses and addresses through negotiation, those cultural issues affecting her and her female characters. Chapter One presents a theoretical basis for this study by providing a frame of discussion regarding the concepts of Feminism, Womanism, Gender, Socialization as well as Aidoo's commitment to these concepts, her commitment to the nation in order to explain how she is able to negotiate her commitment to both African women's issues and nationalism. Chapter Two deals with the dilemma posed in Our Sister Killjoy; Nationalism is discussed specifically in relation to women's issues, as

well as to Gender and Identity. Through this association, we discuss the contentions as well as the negotiation of these two crucial issues in African literature, particularly in African women's literature. Chapter Three engages both the personal and the political in Changes, as it questions the notion of education and redefines the practice of polygamy to suit women's needs and identities in contemporary Ghana. Chapter Four explores Aidoo's style in handling the issues discussed in the above chapters, and her successful attempt in negotiating traditional storytelling and modernist techniques, as a vivid example of how to negotiate past and present.

Aidoo thus makes a literary compact with her bold views concerning the role of an intellectual woman in Ghana, by engaging in a mode of writing combining post modernism with traditional orature.