Towards an African Atlantic: Ama Ata Aidoo's diasporic theater

Abstract

This essay reads the plays of Ghanaian writer Ama Ata Aidoo in dialogue with influential theories of transnationalism to argue that her treatment of colonialism, slavery, gender, and diaspora stretches and reshapes Paul Gilroy's conception of the black Atlantic. Neither Afrocentric nor essentialist, Aidoo is not usually thought of as part of the black diaspora, despite her constant engagement with notions of pan-Africanism, black nationalism, and slavery. By reading two of her plays which specifically engage with the question of black diasporic encounters to explore the links between African Americans and Africans, the author shows how Aidoo's textured representation of tradition and modernity, history and memory, and the local and the global helps define a model of the black Atlantic that can accommodate Africa as a vital participant in transnational exchanges. In showing that traditions are not static, but changing and adapting all the time, Aidoo suggests that the usable past is not a fact to be assumed, but rather a dilemma to be pondered and debated. While The Dilemma of a Ghost (1965) reveals the assumptions inherent in the cultural politics of the Black Arts era, including the questions of pan-Africanism, black masculinity, gender, and nation, Anowa (1970) takes up the more difficult task of re-imagining the relationship across the Atlantic by way of a searching exploration of the tensions internal to a so-called traditional African society in light of the controversial subject of African participation in slavery. By providing a densely textured meditation on the meaning of slavery, the workings of gender in a traditional society, and the relationship between communal and individual agency, Aidoo offers a long view of history to invite us to probe the meaning of past and present and to open up temporal possibilities outside of both nationalist and neocolonialist ones.

Keywords:

• Ama Ata Aidoo
• black Atlantic
• nationalism
• slavery
• Africa
• gender

Notes

1. Fanon, Wretched of the Earth, 216.

2. Fanon, Toward the African Revolution, 27. See also Wretched of the Earth, 212–7.

3. Senghor prioritized his allegiance to De Gaulle's proposed Franco-African community at the expense of Senegal's support for Algeria. Meanwhile, in Fanon's native Martinique, Aimé Césaire backed the constitutional referendum on the Fifth Republic, which made Martinique an overseas department of France. Finally, Rabemananjara, once a political prisoner in French jails and an acclaimed poet of Negritude, and now a minister in Madagascar, voted against Algeria in the General Assembly of the United Nations. See Macey, Frantz Fanon, 371–7.

4. Fanon, Wretched of the Earth, 234. For an extended discussion of Fanon's relation to Negritude, see Parry, “Resistance Theory.”

5. For definitions of diaspora as cultural hybridity beyond ethnicity or nationality, see Appadurai, Modernity at Large; Bhabha, Location of Culture; Clifford, Routes; Gilroy, Black Atlantic; Hall, “Cultural Identity and Diaspora,” “New Ethnicities,” and “Thinking the Diaspora”; and Tölölyan, “Rethinking Diaspora(s).” For recent surveys of the scholarship, see Elmer, “Black Atlantic Archive,” and Santamarina, “‘Are We There Yet?’”

6. Gilroy, Black Atlantic, 2. Further citations to this work are given in the text.

7. I develop this line of thinking further in my book, Romance, Diaspora, and Black Atlantic Literature.

8. Scott, “‘Obscure Miracle of Connection.’”

9. Edwards, “Uses of Diaspora”; Piot, “Atlantic Aporias.” For critiques of Gilroy's exclusion of Africa, see Barnes, “Black Atlantic/Black America”; Gikandi, “Introduction” and “Race and Cosmopolitanism”; Lazarus, Nationalism; and Puri, Caribbean Postcolonial. For a recent review of responses to Gilroy, see Evans, “Black Atlantic.”

10. Boyce Davies, Black Women; Lionnet, Postcolonial Representations.

11. Baraka writes in “Black Art”: “We want ‘poems that kill.’ / Assassin poems, Poems that shoot / guns” (1943). Similarly, Giovanni concludes her poem “For Saundra,” by expressing doubt about writing poetry at a time that called for revolution instead: “maybe I shouldn't write / at all / but clean my gun / and check my kerosene supply / perhaps these are not poetic / times / at all” (2097). Echoing such doubts about the role of art, on the first page of Changes: A Love Story, Aidoo playfully offers an apology for saying, “I could never write about lovers in Accra” (1).

12. Ture and Hamilton, Black Power.

13. Aidoo, “Unwelcome Pals.”

14. Aidoo, Dilemma, 24. Further citations to this work are given in the text.

15. Neal, “And Shine Swam On,” 646.

16. See White, “Africa on My Mind.”

17. Clarke, “Reclaiming,” 11.

18. Neal, “And Shine Swam On,” 654.

19. Elder, “Ama Ata Aidoo,” 159.

20. Warren, “Appeals for (Mis)recognition,” 404. Warren writes: “the diaspora is a thought whose closure cannot be seen by any one individual nor imagined by any single text” (405). For a contrasting view of Aidoo's work promoting a seamless diaspora consciousness, see Gourdine, “Slavery,” and Eke, “Diasporic Ruptures.” For Eke, Dilemma of a Ghost “represents Aidoo's attempts to fulfill one of the goals of Marcus Garvey's ‘Back to Africa’ movement, that is, the return of diasporic Africans to a continental homeland” (69). In my reading, Aidoo problematizes both the notion of a unifying diasporic consciousness and the idea of a return to a homeland.

21. For a compelling reading of Aidoo's later novel, Our Sister Killjoy, as analyzing identity along a variety of axes, see Samantrai, “Caught at the Confluence.”

22. Mbembe, “Subject of the World,” 21, 25, 24. For a recent treatment of this question, see Hartman, Lose Your Mother.

23. Mbember, “Subject of the World,” 26.

24. Aidoo, “Forts, Castles, and Silences,” 30, 32.

25. Aidoo, Anowa, 65. Further citations to this work are given in the text.

26. James, “Ama Ata Aidoo,” 20. For an insightful reading of Anowa, situating it within the specific historical context of Ghana's colonial past, see Odamtten, Art, especially 43–9.

27. Olaogun, “Slavery and Etiological Discourse.” Also see Wilson-Tagoe, “Politics of History,” for a discussion of a range of Ghanaian representations of slavery in relation to African–British relationships.

28. Fanon, Wretched of the Earth, 247–8.