Visualising a Postfeminist Africa in Ama Ata Aidoo’s Changes: A Love Story

Abstract

While, in general, few can doubt the role feminism has played in the rectification of perceived social wrongs against women, misgivings and deep uncertainties are becoming clear in the literatures either about the extent of that role or whether, in the case of literary representation, doctrinaire feminism should continue to play any role at all. The principal stimulus for the doubt has come from the well-known debate concerning the integrity of male representation of the females; the same debates which empowered the revisionary aesthetics so crucial to the entrenchment and sustenance of feminist literature and its associated discourse. The dialectic of the mindset that women writers are better positioned, biologically and culturally, to represent women prompts similar questions about the integrity of women writer‟s representation of women and men. The question, as far as Feminism as an ideology is concerned, is how far, for now, can the case for an essentialist feminine aesthetics of literature be convincingly argued and sustained in view of what biological and cultural positioning portend for representation? The following essay engages a creative response to this question. Ama Ata Aidoo compels us to consider afresh the theoretical connections between Feminism and fiction and to re-examine the literary epistemology in the light of newer ways of thinking and looking at the world. In effect, those of us who look into literature for the „shapes‟ of our world will be amazed at how much the condition of women is still a decisive issue in the production of literature and its associated discourses.