Sissie’s Odyssey: Literary Exorcism in Ama Ata Aidoo’s Our Sister Killjoy

Abstract

A powerful indictment of European (neo-)imperialism, Ama Ata Aidoo’s Our Sister Killjoy or Reflections from a Black-eyed Squint (1977) describes the journey of Sissie, a young Ghanaian woman, to Europe in the years following Ghana’s independence from Britain. Her testimony is the outcome of ‘reflections’ modelled around her ‘black-eyed squint’: that is, her dissection as a black woman of white, male, imperial Europe. Unlike the traditional critical stance that analyses Our Sister Killjoy as a re-writing of Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899), this essay contends that the core text being exorcised by Aidoo’s work is none other than Homer’s Odyssey (c. 800 BC), the cornerstone of the European literary tradition and a more apposite target for Aidoo’s condemnation of European cultural supremacism.