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.

I'm working with four of your books now, Changes, Anowa, No Sweetness Here and The Dilemma of a Ghost, and I have one question about each one. For Changes, I was interested to know why you included four generations in Esi's family, and whether that was intentional. Did each generation represent something different as an ideology, or do they each have something else to offer?

That's how the novel worked out. I'm sorry. Do you see anything symbolic or representative in the generations? It's interesting for me also, as the author, when I'm confronted with interesting questions about my work . . . because I want to interview you and find out where this idea came from. How did you come to even frame the question, because it's an interesting question. The only thing is, I don't have an interesting answer for you.

For me, it had more to do with how I saw Esi than what I thought each generation should mean. First of all, let's face the fact that her daughter is not an active agent herself. She's only ancillary to the life of Esi. And whatever happens in Changes about Ogyaanowa really says more about Esi than the little kid, right? So, to some extent your question underscores a different question: What does Ogyaanowa mean in terms of Esi's life? Now you are asking me to analyze the work as though I was a critic.

None of these ideas occurred to me in the process of writing. I had not sat down and said, "Yes, I'm going to make Esi be a mother so that we can see what kind of a mother she can be," or "let's see how Esi can relate to her own mother and to her grandmother." No. I suspect, at least, that the growth of a novel is slightly more organic than that. With me, things don't occur in terms of how they represent anything, except how they come into the story in an organic kind of way. Now that I've written the novel and sometimes teach it, I can answer your question as a critic. But what good is that? You may as well read other critics who are looking at the four generations in Changes.

The main reason I ask is because what I'm writing about is how three different African Diaspora female writers [Aidoo, Maryse Condé and Edwidge Danticat] conceive of motherhood.

I actually write about the Diaspora more in Anowa than in Changes. In Changes, Esi is clueless when it comes to the relationship between Africans and the African Diaspora. She doesn't deal with it. Anowa is partly about that the Diaspora, and so is The Dilemma of a Ghost. In Sister Killjoy, she deals with everything, including that.

But I want to ask you: How did you come to frame me or negotiate me within the broad concept of diasporic writing? Because the Diaspora is a bi-growth of Africa. So, how does an African writer who has not really lived outside of Africa long enough for her to be considered an émigré become part of diasporic writing?

Well not you, as a writer.

My work?

Right. I think there are some things that can be said, especially in The Dilemma of a Ghost, about what it means to be in Africa and be of African descent and not from Africa.

And to a certain extent even Anowa, because of the whole slave narrative . . . What I mean is, if you're talking about the Diaspora, how did it come about, right?

But I'm just worried about Esi in Changes. She's a strange fish.

My next question is about Anowa and the significance of her barrenness. She asks these slaves to call her mother. What is that role for her—needing to be a mother to these slaves?

Well, it's quite clear that she wanted to be a mother. You know she had raised the question with her husband, no? Throughout, she kept wondering why she couldn't have any children. So, for her it was a yearning for motherhood.

In her environment, given the time and the place, it was difficult for any woman, even an Anowa, to see her life in any other terms, to negotiate her sense of fulfillment in any other way, apart from being a mother. She could be anything—but it was like without being a mother, she just couldn't see that her life was worth much. And for her it was that clear.

And her slaves fill a void?

Yes. Given the time and the place, the wife of the big man was inevitably regarded as the mother of the slaves. You know, in that kind of slavery, they often tried to make the slaves be part of the family. And in fact, later on, there were decrees promulgated, especially by the Ashanti Empire, against asking for someone's origins as part of any kind of relationship or communication. It was against the law to do this because people were not supposed to make others feel like slaves were of slave origin. Humans being what they are . . . one way to prevent one section of society making the other section feel like slaves is to pretend that nobody knows.

My next question pertains to No Sweetness Here and The Dilemma of a Ghost. How do mother/daughter relationships differ from mother/son relationships? Does the mother have to take on a different role with respect to her son than with respect to her daughter?

Well, now that you ask me this question, I must confess that I hardly deal with mother/son relationships, at least to the extent that the mother/daughter thing is all over the place. Basically, that's because I am a girl. Even though my books and plays are not about me, they are definitely about issues that I care about. And I believe that, subconsciously at any rate, I was trying to explore mother/daughter relationships in as many forms as possible, maybe in an effort to understand my own relationship with my mother. Except in The Dilemma of a Ghost, mother/son relationships are missing. We catch a fleeting glimpse in one of the stories in No Sweetness Here, but clearly, mothers and sons are not as close as mothers and daughters. With mothers and daughters there is a bond—not just a bond, but quite often a closeness, a companionship. The mother/daughter relationship is not something that can be taken for granted, obviously. People are busy affirming that relationship or repudiating it, as Anowa definitely does at the beginning of Anowa. And then it is so complicated in Changes.

Clearly, Esi and her mother are not close, but her mother and grandmother are fairly close. Again, maybe it has to be framed in terms of the time and especially the place. Esi could move away—intellectually, socially, she had been moved away from early in her life. And the gap only widened as she got older. From the moment they took her from her mother and grandmother to dump her in a boarding school, she never could, as she herself said, get as close to her mother as her mother had been to her grandmother. It's a matter that clearly was a source of, if not bewilderment, then some sadness, because Esi lamented this fact. For her, it was a lament when she told her grandmother, or when she talked on her own about these things.

The suffering, or rather, the sense of deprivation, welled up. It came to haunt her. And now, looking back—and now I'm wearing my critic's hat—it seems to me such incredible irony that Esi, who hadn't really known much about how it feels to be close to one's mother, is also so incapable of offering that closeness to her own daughter. And it underscores the popular belief in psychology that says that abused children end up being abusive themselves. You know, it's almost as if what we did not receive from our parents we can not give to our children. Obviously, its one of the arenas of human tragedy. And it's something that, if it is true, can explain quite a bit in terms of people's behavior. But, mind you, I had not sat down and thought about all these things before or during the writing of Changes.

What do you believe is the mother's place in contemporary "Western Feminism" or "Third World Feminism?"

Where should she be except where she is? My belief is, first of all, don't put feminism in quotes, because it's a valuable ideological concept. I believe, as a feminist, that motherhood is important, very important. But a woman's worth, a woman's life, can still be valid, productive, and interesting outside of motherhood. I don't believe that if a woman doesn't have children then it's like she might as well not have been born. That's mad. I repudiate that belief completely.

Do you feel that the categories between "Western Feminism" and "Third World Feminism" are arbitrary? Are they really the same thing?

Well, I'm too tired of speaking to that controversy. It's something that I'm interested in, that I've been confronted with, but it takes too much to explain. I don't believe in Western Feminism in Africa. It's like saying, what's the difference between African Christians and Western Christians? There is no difference. There shouldn't be. Except that with Western-ness, in feminism as in religion, you have a feeling that people—if you're talking about the West as in white—don't see you. They don't reckon you as part of the essential data. Automatically.

Every morning, we reckon them as part of our essential data. People don't seem to be aware that when an African woman is considering her world, or the world, automatically she does not take in the white world. The only thing is that, because we don't have that much power, whites don't feel the fight. We don't reckon with them. We do feel the fact that to the Western world, the women, feminists, we are not alive to them. But because they control so much in terms of the power of our contemporary world, then we feel marginalized. That's all.

Do you believe that there's a relationship between literature produced in Africa and literature produced in the Diaspora? Are there any themes that come across in both African and diasporic works?

Well, the thing is, insofar as we all write about people of Africa and African descent, then our work is related. Because sooner or later, you are going to find certain trends in some African writer's work, which you are quite convinced reminds you of something you have already read. You know, a word, a sentence, a viewpoint, a certain character, because basically we are all writing about people of a common stock. There is something like an African, there's something like a person of African descent. There must be a viewpoint that is African and therefore a viewpoint that a writer of African descent has.

As somebody who visits the United States from Africa, sometimes when I listen to African-Americans, it's like I get goose bumps. I hear other things. Echoes. Of people or statements. Rap. The reason I adopted an open mind about rap right from the beginning is because I was hearing something different altogether. When you take away the terrible language, then rap is like word play that comes all the way from Africa. And that's why these Afro-beat kids have taken to rapping in all sorts of African languages. It's because it is so easy for them. It's like race consciousness. You are not aware that it is part of your make-up, but obviously there must be some memory. And so when they started rapping in the U.S., it was easy for these African musicians to imitate them, and start rapping in Akan and other African languages. Now, on the whole continent, contemporary musicians are rapping all over the place. And people can get themselves bent all out of shape, because they are "ruining music." They don't know. It is not ruining anything. It is another form of African music or word play.

So, in terms of writing, I think what we should do to make something interesting, for ourselves, our readers, and the students who study our work, is to be aware of the details. The fact that there is a relationship between writing in Africa and writing in the Diaspora shouldn't even be an interesting question. That relationship is a relationship we should take for granted, of course. The question is how. What are we seeing? What are we hearing? In what way would you say that something that Maryse Condé does in her work, I also do in my work? What echoes are there? What continuities? These are questions that are interesting. Is there anything like an African literature that is not just African because it's written by somebody who lives on the continent? Yes.