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.
