Negotiating with the Diaspora
Ama Ata Aidoo granted this interview in the fall of 2005 at her
office at Brown University. At the time, I was writing a paper, "On
Maternal Partnership: Black Women's Literature as an Exploration into a
Westernizing World," for Barnard College's Middle Passage course. The
paper focuses on Aidoo's work, as well as that of Maryse Condé and
Edwidge Danticant. I conducted interviews with Aidoo and Condé in an
attempt to better understand how their literary works use
mother-daughter relationships to explore the effects of Western
influence on people of African descent.
Aidoo and I spent some three hours exploring this theme as presented
in Changes, Dilemma of a Ghost, Anowa, and No
Sweetness Here. Aidoo's responses were extremely candid and honest.
She critiqued my questions with as much intensity as she questioned her
own impulses while writing. I personally found most salient
her responses to questions about the Diaspora, and her relationship to
and within it.
What do you think is Ghana's connection to other nations of the
Diaspora? Do you think there's any special relationship shared above
other African nations?
Ghana, as the Gold Coast—and even before she became the Gold
Coast—was by a certain trick of history the base for most of the forts
that the Europeans built along the coast of West Africa to house their
slaves. A predominant number of the so-called slave forts are in Ghana,
including the biggest and most notorious of them all, the El Mina
Castle. That, plus Cape Coast Castle, seemed to occupy rather preeminent
positions in terms of the slave fort/castle hierarchy. And because of
the inevitable growth of the slave trade in relation to these castles,
according to historians, Ghana has been responsible for much of the West
African slave trade—certainly in terms of percentage.
And now, as a result of all that, quite a lot of the formalized
communication between Africa and the Diaspora is being done through
Ghana. We have African-Americans and Afro-Caribbeans coming over to bury
the bones of their slave ancestors. And of course, Ghana is where W.E.B.
Dubois came to spend his last years, where he died and got buried.
How do you define the term "homeland" or "motherland"? And what
purpose does it serve for someone with a transnational identity, or who
conceives of themselves as traveling between nations?
Well, I don't even use the term "homeland" because I think it is
patronizing. I think it has crept into the English language, used by
people to refer to the countries of so-called third-world peoples,
minorities. They are always saying "her African homeland." I can't stand
the term, so I don't use it to describe any place that I am connected
to. I know that I come from a country, the State that is Ghana. If you
ask me where home is, I can point to a specific area in south central
Ghana where I was born and where I spent my formative years.
When I was in Ghana in 2005, Kofi Awonoor said that you were very
much a "Fante woman," and the way you write is very much characteristic
of a "Fante woman." I'm not sure what that means.
I'm not sure what that means either. The thing is, if you are a
writer and you grew up in a certain kind of environment that would
inform your writing . . .. When James Baldwin left New York and went to
live in Paris, was he still very much a New York writer, or a Parisian
writer? What I'm saying is that I'm afraid that when Kofi says that, he
is also trying to see me in terms of his definition, his own conceptions
of what informs any writer's work. If I am very much a Fante woman
writer, then he is very much an Ewe male writer. You know what I'm
saying? It's like a rationalization of some sort. When somebody says
that I'm very much a Fante writer, as far as I'm concerned it is neither
a compliment nor a fault. It's a fact. I was born a Fante. Having been
born and bred in a Fante background, what else can I be but a Fante
writer? I couldn't be, what? A Ga writer. I couldn't be a Yoruba writer.
And I definitely couldn't be a Mississippi writer. So as far as I'm
concerned, I don't consider that one of the most significant aspects of
my writing.
How do you feel that immigration to the U.S. differs from
immigration anywhere else in
the West? Do you think that there's something distinct about being an
immigrant in the U.S.?
I have never lived here. You may not know this, but I have only ever
visited. The longest period that I have stayed in the U.S. consistently
is one and a half years. So I'm wondering whether I am capable of even
speaking to the issue. My impressions of living here have not been
complex enough.
The longest I've ever lived anywhere has been in Africa. I lived in
England for a year or two, but that's about all. Now, I don't know that
that's enough to make complex comparisons. If you would want me to say
something about being a visitor to the United States as compared to
being a visitor to, say, England, I should be able to do that for
whatever it is worth, which shouldn't be much.
Why don't you think that it would be much?
Well, because a visitor's impressions—precisely because you are a
visitor—don't go deep enough. There are certain areas in human life and
organizations, which as a visitor to a place, you cannot touch at all.
So it is very facile, your impressions. I know what it is like to arrive
in New York in the winter, for instance, straight from Africa. You can
read any number of books and you can hear any number of travel tales
about how cold winter can be. Now, experiencing it is another story.
I know that as a visitor to the United States—say, places to the
south, like New Orleans—I can talk endlessly about how I need to define
myself every morning before I go out, to confront my woman-ness, my
blackness, in a way that I don't have to in Ghana. In Ghana, your being
female is something that you have to deal with, perhaps on a daily basis
too, but not your blackness. Because practically everybody around you is
black. It's the same when I go to Europe. I cannot take my blackness or
my African-ness for granted anywhere in the world except Africa. And
then, even in Africa, if you go to a place where until recently white
was the power color, even then you still have to deal with it—like when
I first went to Zimbabwe. Or South Africa. In all these places, it's
amazing how even now race is such a big issue.
And what is so incredible is that people who are not African or black
do not want to face it—can never bring themselves to face it—because the
moment you start talking to them, they start pointing out prominent
black people. These days, they will tell you that the Secretary of State
of the United States, Condoleezza Rice, is a black person. How does that
impact my life as an ordinary black woman on the university campus? If
you go into the street in Providence, people talk to you like you are
dumb and hard of hearing. That still amazes me. You know, people talk to
you like they would talk to their pets, except more rudely. They are not
rude to their pets, but they are rude to you as a black person. And as
far as I'm concerned, there isn't much of a difference between attitudes
here in the U.S. and attitudes anywhere else outside the continent of
Africa—or, more specifically, outside Ghana and some other countries in
Africa. You can't even say that you can take your color for granted
everywhere in Africa as a continent.
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