Damned if You Do, Damned if You Don’t: Victimhood and Agency in the Works of Ama Ata Aidoo

Abstract

Ama Ata Aidoo has made a remarkable contribution to African literature as a pioneering and outspoken voice for women. Her role as playwright, poet, novelist and scholar has propelled her into the forefront of African feminist creativity to uplift the status of women. Her works articulate the impact of social, economic and political forces that shape the lives of and define the African reality. Gender dynamics, patriarchy, urbanization, tradition and modernity are themes that resonate throughout her works that span four decades of the post-Independence era. It may be argued that African who uphold traditional expectations are damned to experience unsatisfying and difficult outcomes, and ironically who through their own agency dare to stray from custom and convention are also damned to censure and outcast status by society. Scholars have highlighted Aidoo's presentation of the dilemma tale, tragedy, and parable to analyze the Post colonial African female's entrapment within a maze of conflicting realities: (Odamtten 104, Nwankwo 154, Katrak 140, Opara 44, Nfah- Abbenenyi 287). Research and critical analysis of Ama Ata Aidoo's works explores the status of African through the lens of tradition and modernity, feminist consciousness, and patriarchal structures that are set against the colonial and post-colonial landscape.The purpose of this paper is to first examine how Ama Ata Aidoo explores thematic changes in portraiture of African characters as victims of a complex social matrix of cultural expectations and circumstances that may foster the emergence of selfhood and feminist consciousness. Secondly, the examination of stories from No Sweetness Here, her play Anowa and her second novel Changes will interrogate the paradoxical outcomes that lay at the heart of all Aidoo's works because the protagonists' response to patriarchy, urbanization, and conflicting demands of modernity catapult them into dichotomous terrain fraught with confused identities and outright contradictions.This paper will expand the existing body of literature on Aidoo's works through the idea that women's agency to negotiate and reconfigure gender dynamics is largely ineffectual unless African society changes the social, economic and political structures that subvert the equality of women.Ama Ata Aidoo's short stories, plays and novels represent a trajectory of Feminist expression through creative literature. Her works capture the dynamism and realism of African women's lives as they cope with the post- colonial landscape of competing and challenging realities. Her collection \'o Sweetness Here (1970) present stories that portray African faced with choices that are not viable in the traditional context, or the modern world of social flux and changing identities. This theme continues in her play Anowa, also published in 1970 in which the female protagonist is cast as victim who suffers for her ill-advised assertion of whom to marry. Her last novel. Changes a Love Story (1991) explores the complexities of African women's choices and responsibility for one's destiny through examining the lives of three characters.Aidoo asserts that, On the whole, African traditional societies seemed to have been at odds with themselves as to exactly what to do with women (47).No Sweetness HereThe collection of short stories No Sweetness Here reveals that neither choice is a good choice for the African woman. Chimalum Nwankwo states that Neither the woman who espouses traditional and conservative wifely values nor the woman who pursues her social pleasures liberally find life rewarding (154). Two Sisters explores this theme as the reader observes Connie, an unhappily married woman who represents the passive and respectable wife while her husband is repeatedly unfaithful. Aidoo skillfully illustrates women's vulnerability within the context of deviating forms of marriage that evolve from pre-colonial to modern parameters of convention. …