Seeking the Root and Accepting Branches : the Conflicts and Dilemmas in Ama Ata Aidoo’s Dilemma of a Ghost

Abstract

Since the middle of the 20th century, the continent of Africa has greeted many “returnees,” the diasporic descendants who moved in or visited in search of their “root.” As the number of returnees increased, marriages between Ghanaians and immigrants increased as well. The Dilemma of a Ghost (1965), written by Ama Ata Aidoo from Ghana, presents one of the rather unsuccessful marriages between a Ghanaian man and an African American woman. This paper analyzes Aidoo’s text based on the social and cultural understanding of Ghanaian society in the 1960s. I draw on early and later writings of W. E. B DuBois’s writing to bring in critical perspectives. Showing how Ato, Eulalie, and Ato’s family deal with the conflicts, Aidoo questions the conceptual “root” of the returnees and the dilemma of both Ghanaians and the diasporic Blacks. Through the portrayal of Ato and Eulalie’s failure to settle in, the play spotlights the easily neglected gap between Africans and diasporic Africans under the vague cover of Black solidarity; further, it suggests a potential solution by letting the uneducated, indigenous, and feminine rather than the empowered masculine elite offer hope by facing and embracing the problems.