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Some Criticisms of The Dilemma of a Ghost
Ama Atta Aid
"Ama Ata Aidoo's The Dilemma of a Ghost and demonstrate the process of finding a cultural identity that does not privilege an originary moment, yet provides space for a negotiated Pan-African identity for West Africans and African Americans. This plays deal with the issue of constructing a Pan-African identity through connecting African Americans with West Africans and both highlight the simultaneous necessity for and failure of cultural translation to facilitate that connection. In each play, we find a female protagonist returning to Africa only to find that the connection she initially sought was not naturally there just waiting for her. Eulalie find the need for a cultural translation and each looks to her African "been-to" husband/lover to provide it. In this Book, the expected translator fails in his duties. It is left, instead, for the West African communities themselves, led by women, to provide a translation of culture to the African-American woman that will allow them to connect with and embrace their African identity while respecting the cultures that they find in Africa (rather than the culture that they project onto Africa). This plays, then, challenge romanticized notions of Pan-African identification through an emphasis on cultural translation and reveal the failure of the male-centered model of translation that would posit the husband as the sole translator for the wife and the "been-to" man as the sole translator for the community. Instead, a feminist agency is exerted by the West African communities in which these plays are set that undoes the western notion of translation as the domain of the male, and moves it into a female-led, democratic process by which the community as a whole makes decisions about how to translate itself to the diasporic culture, thus asserting a kind of indigenous African agency while privileging the role of the female within this agency. And Some critics have complained about her repeated attacks on the West."
by KO Secovnie
Opinion
The play is about a Ghanaian man, Ato, who returns home from the United States with an African-American wife. He has not consulted his family about the marriage, and the conflict between the two cultures is played out through the characters' interactions. The man himself is torn between his Ghanaian past and his acquired American ideals. The tension between the communal and traditional Ghanaian value system and the individualistic American culture are further played out in the confrontations between Ato's mother and his American wife. At the end of the play, mother and wife reconcile, and thus the dilemma of the title is solved.
Marialejandra RodrÃguez Arango
Opinions about Literature of Ghana
In this space are the criticisms made ​​to the works of the literature of ghana, and our personal views on the same.
Mary Okeke reviews "Changes: A Love Story", 1991, by Ama Ata Aidoo.
"I finished reading this book yesterday, I loved it. It is one of my favourite books. This is Ama Ata's first book I have read so far and I am really impressed. I am looking forward to reading more. With this novel she won the 1992 CommonWealth Writer's Prize for best book (Africa), she sure deserved it. Aidoo's storyline are like that of Emecheta's (at least this novel) they tell story of women (always in a cultural clash) trying to live according to their heart desires despite their cultural circumstances.
This novel tells the story of a very learned Ghanaian woman called Esi, with a highly demanding job, married to a man out of gratefulness and now considers him time-consuming and at last decided to divorce him after an event she described as "marital rape" took place. Marital rape in a quotation mark because in her culture it is indescribable"Sex is something a husband claims from his wife as his right. Any time. And at his convenience. Besides, any "sane" person, especially sane women, would consider any other women lucky or talented or both, who can make her husband lose his head like that" but still she felt uncomfortable about the whole situation.
She madly fell in love with a married man who decided to make her his second wife, she later discovered that his way of loving is quite inadequate for her, but still she has to find out what type of loving was she ever going to consider adequate.
Esi finds her self in the middle of a cultural clash. None of her people could sympathise with her because she had feelings and desires to live a life that is so incomprehensible to them. Sometimes they (her people) asked themselves what was the whole reason of sending her to school. This is what she was told in one of her conversation with her grandmother; "Not many women are this lucky..... And who told you that feeling grateful to a man is not enough reason to marry him? My lady, the world would die of surprise if every woman openly confessed the true reason why she married a certain man...." And Esi was trying to tell them that love is the sole reason why anyone should get married, she was rebuked "Love is not safe...., love is dangerous.... the last man any woman should think of marrying is the man she loves." I think life is just too hard and too short to spend it with someone you do not love."
By: Mary Okeke
Opinion.
I have not had the opportunity to read this title (yet), but if something is true is that from all the titles that the author has, I chose this because I felt identified with the title, the animation of the cover and various summaries in Internet I read, I believe that the vision of the author in regard to love is something very important, it is very interesting that in between all the socio-political conflicts that Ghana has, a person just wait for a moment and reflect on what makes the important human, the love, no more noble than this, I find their bases in which is human, and in their everyday thinking.
The book itself proposes a beautiful conclusion with which I would like to close this panel review.
Life is very cute, very short, very fast, to love those who do not want love.
Nicolás Quintero Hernández.
Why are we so blest?
by: Ayi Kwei Armah
Why Are We So Blest? (1972) was set largely in an American University, and focused on a student, Modin Dofu, who has dropped out of Harvard. Disillusioned Modin is torn between independence and Western values. He meets a Portuguese black African named Solo, who has already suffered a mental breakdown, and a white American girl, Aimée Reitsch. Solo, the rejected writer, keeps a diary, which is the substance of the novel. Aimée's frigidity and devotion to the revolution leads finally to destruction, when Modin is killed in the desert by O.A.S. revolutionaries. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ayi_Kwei_Armah)
Opinion: this book, according with african literature experts exposes a painful reality in a beautiful way, where talks about war, love and die. I did not read book (yet) but this is an amazing opotunity to explore in the interesting and hidden Ghana Literature.